English usage | Steve Woods

Network Rail messes up on dog fouling

14/07/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Tech

One of the great tools not available to previous generations of those producing print for public consumption is the spell checker – an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary or search engine.

However, some people and/or organisations still seem reluctant to use them, such as UK railway infrastructure operator Network Rail, which chickened out on the occasion shown below and thus qualified for a residency in Homophone Corner. 🙂
Microsoft sits in homophone corner

16/06/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

This blog has discussed homophones before (posts passim). Homophone corner is a space to which people who cannot distinguish their homophones are banished to consider the errors of their ways – rather like the corner of the classroom to which misbehaving children were exiled during my primary school days.

It now appears as though the curse of the homophone is spreading to the giants of the technology world, as shown by the following tweet from Nix Tran Stories.

I’ve used Microsoft Word/Office since the days of Windows 3.1 and its spelling and grammar checking tools have in my opinion never been particularly good: I’ve always run rings around them; and now it appears that the spellchecker has been coded by an illiterate.

I suppose the least I could do is pat the leader of the MS Office team on the shoulder and mouth the platitude “their, there, they’re!“. 😉
New Zealand MP caught using unparliamentary language by sign language interpreter

30/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

In politics passion often rises to the surface in the rough and tumble of debate; and that’s exactly what happened in the New Zealand parliament in the case of Ron Mark, a member of parliament for the conservative New Zealand First party.

The Mirror reports that Mr Mark became irritated with muttering from across the chamber during a pre-budget question time debate in a tense parliamentary session.

Ron Mark was interrupted by jeering from the Government benches and muttered “shut the f**k up” under his breath.

This went unnoticed by his fellow members, but a sign language interpreter who had been invited to parliament as part of sign language awareness week did hear his outburst and signed it for all to see.

Mr Mark later apologised for his unparliamentary language.

Hat tip: Atlas Translations.
More culinary sexism

16/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Perhaps taking its lead from a city centre café in Bristol (posts passim), multinational junk food chain McDonalds has now introduced sexism onto its menu.

The advertisement below was spotted on Easton Way, Bristol this morning.

Once again bacon and sausage are apparently foods exclusively for men. If any woman is ‘man enough’ to ask for them, what would that make her – a tomboy or a butch lesbian? Or simply unfeminine?

Answers in the comments below, please McDonalds.
Inspirational motto meets immovable object

15/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

When I worked for Imperial Tobacco many decades ago, I used to hate the inspirational texts that came on the desk calendars with which all office staff were issued. Another pet hate is company mottoes, which usually have that same inspirational or aspirational element.

Given my hostility to these forms of literature, the photograph below could do nothing else but provoke a smile: a truck driver – presumably on the road to success – tries do effect a short cut of his own and reduce the height of his trailer to 10 feet using a convenient railway overbridge.

Hat tip: Harry Tuttle.
Braking bad

09/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.

However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.

Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.

You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.

The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).

The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).

Got it now?

Good! 🙂
Research shows language you speak changes your view of the world

29/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

In research that was published recently in Psychological Science, German-English bilinguals and German and English monoglots were studied to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

This research shows that bilinguals can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language in which they are operating, according to Mashable.

The past 15 years have seen extensive research on the bilingual mind, with most of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of being bilingual. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

To quote the abstract for the research paper:

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Bilingual German and Frisian police station sign. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By way of illustrating these differences, Mashable’s piece gives a handy example of these different world views

German-English bilinguals were shown video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket. The participants were then asked to describe the scenes.

When such a scene is presented to a monoglot German speaker they will tend to describe the action and the goal of the action. Thus they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. English monoglot speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action.

As regards the effect of the language being spoken on bilingual speakers’ perceptions of the world, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language in which they were given the task. Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. However, a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the UK were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

Hat tip: Katya Ford.
Post exclusive: Bristol Rovers change kit

23/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s a hidden exclusive in today’s online edition of the Bristol Post. Unknown to the fans and probably the club itself, the Post reveals that Bristol Rovers now play in “blue and white stripes“, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Post journalists, here are the three strips currently used by Bristol Rovers. Please note the only stripes are on the alternative away colours and have one thin blue stripe. The pattern used on the regular strip is commonly known as “quarters“.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Post also mentions in the article that Catalonia’s CE Sabadell FC (who are in the Spanish Segunda División. Ed.) play in a strip “similar” to that of Rovers. FC Sabadell’s current strips are shown below and yes, the home strips do look very similar, even if the teams’ respective league positions do not; Rovers are chasing promotion from the Conference, whilst Sabadell are fighting relegation.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Let’s hope the players of both teams are more on target than Bristol’s alleged newspaper of record. 🙂
Election special: Labour love hard work

16/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Vote Labour, get a lifetime of hard labour?
Political language relies to a great extent on clichés. Two of the most over-used terms of recent times is “hard work” and “hard working“, with the latter usually attached to the noun families and implying that the childless in society are incapable of arduous slogging.

With some free time on my hands this morning, I spent a leisurely hour going through the main UK party manifestos (excluding regional parties such as Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Northern Ireland parties) for the forthcoming general election looking for instances of “hard work“. The results for each manifesto are shown below.

1st: Labour 5
2nd: Conservatives 3
3rd: Liberal Democrats & UKIP 1 each
5th Green Party 0

Both my parents were unskilled manual workers who left school at the age of 14 and worked all their lives. Indeed my father once told me that on his last day of schooling, he went to school in the morning, left at midday and went straight to work for a local farmer as an agricultural labourer in the afternoon.

I remember the physical effect that hard work had on their bodies. Both were prematurely aged long before the official retirement age. My father died at the relatively young age of 67, whilst my mother, who although she lived to be nearly 82, was disabled from her mid-50s onwards by a debilitating stroke. I therefore do not regard hard work as such as the same great virtue as the closeted and cosseted inhabitants of the Westminster Village, who’ve probably never done a hard day’s physical graft in their lives.
There, their, they’re Bristol Post

12/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

The minions of the Bristol Post, possibly under strain from toiling away at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth looking for the city’s blandest news content, seem to have particular difficulty with homophones, i.e. words that are pronounced the same as another word but differ in meaning and may differ in spelling.

This was amply illustrated below by a photo gallery posted this morning on the local organ’s website.

Should the Post’s ‘journalists’ wish to cure themselves of acute homophonia, help is at hand up at Bristol University.

Its website has a handy grammar tutorial page for the illiterati on the simple differences between there, their and they’re.

To quote from that page

There is the place, i.e. not here.

Their is the possessive form indicating belonging to them.

They’re is the contracted form of “they are”.

Have you got that, Bristol Post, if so Bristol University’s site also has a useful exercise to check whether the lesson has sunk in.

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