English usage | Steve Woods

Bristol Post Balls – bad punning and sexism

15/08/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Regular readers will be aware that the Bristol Post is not renowned for the quality of its journalism.

However, the dreadful pun and sexism of today’s front page of the dead tree edition marked a new low in the paper’s already woeful standards.

Bad puns are annoying in headlines at the best of times and sexism is tolerated far less than when the fifty-something males in charge of producing Bristol’s daily work of fiction first started out in what was then called journalism.

There has been a steady stream of criticism of the Bristol Post on Twitter throughout the day.

However, the paper has not sought to respond to any of its critics, presumably because the person in charge of the Twitter account has yet to notice the ‘reply’ button.

In addition, some of Bristol’s Twitterati have also been alerting the national media to The Post’s disgraceful front page seeking to trivialise a sexual assault.

With front pages like the one above, is it any surprise that the Post’s circulation figures (as measured by ABC) are falling by nearly 11% per year? Not to me it isn’t!

Update 18/08/14: Bristol 24-7 is reporting today that Bristol City councillor Naomi Rylatt has written to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) over the above front page headline, describing it as a “disgusting attempt at humour“.
Cricket explained

30/07/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

The second Test series between England and India is currently taking place in Southampton (it’ll be day 3 today. Ed.) and my radio is tuned to the epic poem that is the BBC’s Test Match Special from 10.25 until the close of play each day, with the likes of Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and Geoffrey Boycott (posts passim) filling the air with their wise words and wit.

Cricket is a complex game that can take a long time to understand fully and I’m still occasionally baffled by the commentators. For the uninitiated, the many different laws and the strange names for positions on the field can seem overwhelming. For instance, which other game has a position on the field called ‘cow corner’*?.

Below is a simple explanation for the uninitiated, which I originally heard at school decades ago as a brief summary of the game for foreigners.

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

For those who need help with fielding positions, Wikimedia Commons has helpfully provided the following graphic.

Note that the fielding positions would be reversed for a left-handed batsman.

* Cow corner = the area of the field (roughly) between deep mid-wicket and wide long-on. So called because few ‘legitimate’ shots are aimed to this part of the field, so fielders are rarely placed there – leading to the concept that cows could happily graze in that area.
Generational change: graffito

13/07/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

“Punk is dead” is a phrase recalled from my early twenties and apparently dates from 1978. Furthermore, “Punk is Dead” is also the title of a song by the legendary anarchist punk band Crass.

This morning a variation on the phrase drifted into my Twitter feed, as shown by the photograph below.

For today’s younger people, about the age that I was when punk first emerged, the leading lights of punk rock such as The Clash, Sex Pistols and their contemporaries have probably been added to the likes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and other more typical exponents of “Dad Rock“.

Additional research has revealed that “Punk is Dad” is the title of a song by Berlin-based band Ohrbooten.

Could the graffito be cheap promotion for Ohrbooten’s offering – or is it just bad spelling? 🙂
LibreUmbria@Scuola nominated for Egov 2014 prize

03/07/2014 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

News arrived via my inbox this morning that LibreUmbria‘s programme in schools (LibreUmbria@Scuola), which took place in recent months in collaboration with Perugia’s third teaching district (posts passim), has been nominated for this year’s Egov Prize. LibreUmbria is the project that is promoting the use of free and open source software amongst public sector organisations in Italy’s Umbria region.

The basic idea behind the Egov Prize has always been the fusion and sharing of good practice which other public sector organisations can use as an example and from which they can benefit. This will be the 10th year the prize will have been awarded.

LibreUmbria@Scuola aims to raise awareness and promote the use of free software in schools, from the primary level upwards by training parents and teachers who will in turn train others by acting as mentors.

The LibreUmbria@Scuola project has been implemented in arranging free seminars at schools for parents and teachers, on digital culture topics (the relationship between boys and technology, shared knowledge and free software, security, use of social media, cyberbullying). In addition to the seminars, computer courses in using the LibreOffice productivity suite running on Ubuntu Linux were also provided.
Caption chaos

02/07/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

Being sloppy is one thing at which the Bristol Post consistently excels and the situation only looks to get worse following the announcement by David Montgomery of Local World – the owners of the Bristol Post – on the future direction of its titles and the role of journalists.

Today’s most glaring howler features photographs with the wrong captions in this article, as illustrated below.

That’s the first locomotive I’ve seen with blonde hair! 😉

The chaos continues with subsequent photographs in the series too.

How anyone can confuse a girl with a locomotive is anyone’s guess.

Is the Post employing visually-impaired journalists?

We should be told.
Bristol Post: England invests £168 in roads

21/06/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Politics

According to yesterday’s online edition of the Bristol Post, the Department of Transport is to invest the princely sum of £168 – the largest amount it has spent on tarmac for four decades – in England’s road network.

Of this total, the amount earmarked for local authorities in the Bristol area swells magically to more than £2 mn., according to a this piece by an unidentified Post hack.

The second paragraph of the report reads as follows:

The handout from a £168 funding pot which will see more than £3 million potholes filled is part of what is being billed as “the biggest investment in roads since the 1970s”.

For those who prefer their information unmangled by the illiterates of the local media, the original Department of Transport press release is available here.
Ah! Bristo

20/05/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

One of the features of the variety of English spoken in Bristol is the terminal ‘L’ – a final, intrusive ‘L’ on words ending in a vowel sound. As a consequence, Bristolians live in areals of the city and some of them do their shopping in Asdal.

This terminal L found its earliest expression in the city’s name itself, which has mutated from Brigstowe in Saxon times.

However, the terminal L is now under threat from poor writing and editing at the Bristol Post (or should that be Bristo Post? Ed.), as revealed in this blatant advertisement masquerading as news, complete with obligatory screenshot.

More of this poorly written junk can be expected in future as the Bristol Post – along with the rest of the Local World group to which it belongs – will be making increasing use of user-provided content, presumably to save on employing trained journalists.
Another variant on the HMRC fake email

14/05/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Tech

This morning I discovered the fake HMRC email below in one of my inboxes.

I’m disappointed to note that the senders of this one are only offering me a refund of £830.99; the previous bunch of scammers were offering £1,400.

TAX RETURN FOR THE YEAR 2014
RECALCULATION OF YOUR TAX REFUND
HMRC 2010-2011
LOCAL OFFICE No. 3819
TAX CREDIT OFFICER: Jarrett Horn
TAX REFUND ID NUMBER: 9896077
REFUND AMOUNT: 830.99 GBP

Dear Applicant,

The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and as applicable, copyright in these is reserved to HM Revenue & Customs.

Unless expressly authorised by us, any further dissemination or distribution of this email or its attachments is prohibited.

If you are not the intended recipient of this email, please reply to inform us that you have received this email in error and then delete it without retaining any copy.

I am sending this email to announce: After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 830.99 GBP

You have attached the tax return form with the TAX REFUND NUMBER ID: 9896077, complete the tax return form attached to this message.

After completing the form, please submit the form by clicking the SUBMIT button on form and allow us 5-9 business days in order to process it.

Our head office address can be found on our web site at HM Revenue & Customs: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk

Sincerely,

Jarrett Horn
HMRC Tax Credit Office
Preston<br /.
TAX REFUND ID: UK9896077-HMRC

This email was delivered from a Korea Telecom server and came with an attachment -Refund-Form-ID_9896077.zip (the number in the zip file varies).

Some of the language used – e.g. ‘fiscal activity‘ – is also a clue to its bogus nature. HMRC is supposed to use simpler English than that. Furthermore, note that the title seems to suggest the tax return concerned is for 2014, but the refund relates to 2011-2012. Not even HMRC is that slow in refunding money.

If you’re on a Windows machine, opening that zip file is fraught with danger as the archive contains a Trojan which, when run, attempts to drop cryptolocker, ransomware and loads of other malware on your computer.

As stated in an earlier post, HMRC never sends notifications of a tax rebate by email or asks taxpayers to disclose personal or payment information by email.

As before, if you receive one of these emails, you are advised to forward it to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk and then delete it.

Once again, consult HMRC’s website for comprehensive advice on phishing and bogus emails.
Spelling error clue to tax refund phishing scam

11/05/2014 Steve WoodsOddities, Tech

Without exception, everyone likes to get money back off the taxman.

That being so, how would you react if you found the email below in one of your mailboxes?

Genuine email from HMRC or a fake – can you tell?

With the subject line “Error in the calculation of your tax“, all the right colours used by HMRC and genuine links to HMRC website pages on both the left and right of the main message, it definitely has the appearance of a genuine email from the taxman.

Would your reaction be one of joy that HMRC is prepared to refund you £1,400 of your hard-earned cash? Would that then lead you to click on the link below that figure in green text – the one enticingly indicating My Refvund?

Running my mouse over that link revealed that it did not go to the HMRC website at all, but a phishing page on a website that seems to be hosted in Bangkok, which is not somewhere I suspect that hosts many .gov.uk domains.

In addition to the dodgy spelling of the link, another clue is the incorrect use of capitalisation in the final paragraph.

In case readers were unaware of the HMRC’s procedures, the taxman never sends notifications of a tax rebate by email or asks taxpayers to disclose personal or payment information by email.

HMRC’s advice to anyone who has received a HMRC-related phishing/bogus email it to forward it to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk and then delete it.

HMRC’s website has comprehensive advice on phishing and bogus emails.

Stay safe!
The rustication of Clifton

11/05/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Earlier today, the news section of the Bristol Post transported the city’s affluent district of Clifton to the countryside, describing it as ‘rural’, as shown in the following screenshot.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary rural has many meanings; the one implied by the Post’s usage is the OED’s definition 1c:

Employed or stationed in country districts.

Are the people of Clifton yokels?

Bristol absorbed Clifton in the 19th century, so any green wellies seen will be very clean and not covered in cow’s muck; they’ll be worn for fashion not for necessity. Although Clifton’s renowned Downs are still common land, the locals don’t seem to graze much livestock upon them. Nevertheless, some activities which may be regarded as animal take place up there.

The word rural has since been removed from the headline.

I always believed press articles supposed to be sub-edited before being posted. Apparently this does not seem to be the usual practice down at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

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