English usage

  • Piper and penguin

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

    I’ve been aware of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton et al. and their expeditions to Antarctica since my childhood and on Christmas Eve this year was made aware through social media of the exploits of the 1902-1904 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition.

    Although its work was overshadowed by more prestigious expeditions, the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition nevertheless completed a full programme of exploration and scientific work, including the establishment of the first manned meteorological station in Antarctic territory, as well as the discovery of new land to the east of the Weddell Sea.

    Below is a photograph taken on that expedition; a suitably light-hearted one of piper Gilbert Kerr serenading a penguin.

    Gilbert Kerr, piper, with penguin. Photographed by William Speirs Bruce during the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, 1902-04
    Gilbert Kerr, piper, with penguin. Photographed by William Speirs Bruce during the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, 1902-04. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    However, penguins did more for the expedition than provide an audience for pipers. They were a regular item on the menu too!

    A typical day’s diet there might have been: breakfast of porridge and penguin eggs, with bacon on Wednesdays and Thursdays and coffee or cocoa week about. Lunch of eggs with bully beef or bread and cheese and tea. Dinner of penguin “hare soup”, then stewed penguin, with some farinaceous pudding or preserved fruit to follow.

    The above comes from the text accompanying a splendid photo of Bill Smith, the expedition’s cook from Glasgow Digital Library, which has a fine collection of photographs from the expedition. I also love the final sentence on the page too for its description of Smith:

    Smith’s substantial physique is a good advertisement for the value of his own work.

    Season’s greetings all.

  • Bristol Post Balls: the return of the greengrocer

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The Bristol Post is no stranger to the greengrocer’s (or superfluous) apostrophe (posts passim).

    There’s a fine example in the headline for a photo gallery in today’s online edition.

    screenshot of Bristol Post article
    Santa’s 2013 what, Bristol Post?

    The mandatory screenshot is included above as the occupants of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth may have realised or been alerted to their mistake (I’m sure they wait use your daily review of the paper’s contents as a proofreading tool. Ed.) by the time you read this.

  • Bristol Post Balls – beefing about faggots

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Today the Bristol Post has been occupied with faggots. It all started when Facebook, that bastion of free speech, banned the use of the word faggot as offensive. Apparently they’ve never heard of this traditional item of English cuisine over the pond, where faggot is a term of abuse for homosexuals.

    As a result, Mr Brain’s – a producer of culinary products resembling faggots that started life in the Bristol area – has started a campaign to fight against Facebook’s ban, which is duly being reported by the Post.

    In addition, the Post also informed its readers what faggots are. Any similarity between the Post’s article and the introduction to Wikipedia’s faggots article is presumably purely coincidental.

    However, the Post hasn’t finished with faggots yet; it also tells its by now slavering readers how to make faggots. After having stated that faggots are made from pork, the Post drops a real clanger on this report, illustrating it with a photograph of a butcher (so far, so good. Ed.) posing with a joint of beef (D’oh! Ed.), as evidenced by the screenshot below.

    Bristol Post screenshot

  • Bristol City Council – the developer’s friend

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    My attention was drawn today to a curious article on the Local Government Association website from Bristol City Council.

    To me it’s reminiscent of a livestock dealer crowing about the fine qualities of the beast he’s trying to sell or perhaps even a prostitute buttering up a prospective client.

    There are some fine examples of jargon too.

    However, this article gives me cause for concern on three counts.

    Firstly, I’m paying the wages of the council’s planning wonks directly through my council tax (and indirectly through your national taxes, a portion of which gets returned to local authorities by way of government grant. Ed.), but it seems like they’re not working for the benefit of the city’s residents, but the planners seem rather concerned with working for the benefit of property developers.

    This leads on to my second concern: those chummy quarterly chats with the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA), a cosy club whose membership is drawn from primarily from local residential and commercial property agents, as well as commercial property lawyers, developers, architects, planners, building and quantity surveyors.

    Finally, there’s the offer to renegotiate Section 106 agreements. These are planning obligations under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (as amended) and are a mechanism which make a development proposal acceptable in planning terms, that would not otherwise be acceptable. They are focused on site specific mitigation of the impact of development. S.106 agreements are often referred to as ‘developer contributions’ along with highway contributions and the Community Infrastructure Levy.

    For a cash-strapped council, I would have thought that its priority should be squeezing as much from developers under S.106 as it can.

    Evidently not.

    The example of Finzels [sic] Reach given in the article is interesting. After being granted planning permission, the developers renegotiated their S.106 obligations and still went into administration last year. Perhaps their scheme was so poorly planned and financed, it should not have been given planning permission in the first place.

    The article – dated 8th October 2013 – is reproduced in full below.

    Bristol City Council: open for business on Section 106 agreements

    Bristol City Council has an ‘open for business’ policy in relation to bringing forward development and investment in the city. Last year the Council received just over 3,000 planning applications, saying ‘yes’ to over 80 per cent of these (89 per cent of major schemes).

    The council meets representatives of the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA) on a quarterly basis in order to discuss live issues, including delivery of development. The West of England Planning Toolkit and the Bristol Planning Protocol were jointly produced with representatives from the development sector.

    Bristol has a good record of housing delivery. Its adopted Core Strategy target is for a minimum of 26,400 dwellings to be delivered between 2006 and 2026, and in the six years since 2006 over 12,700 (approximately 48 per cent) of these dwellings have been constructed. In addition, there are around 7,000 residential units currently with planning consent in the city – a significant proportion of which are yet to be commenced. In order to ensure this much needed development is brought forward, Bristol proactively seeks requests from developers to renegotiate Section 106 agreements on schemes that have become unviable since planning consent was granted. Requests are considered by the planning committee in a process that includes an open book appraisal of viability by the developer.

    Outcome and impact

    This approach is proving successful. Examples include Finzels Reach (a £200 million mixed-use development site in central Bristol), which is a high quality regeneration scheme on a strategically important site.

    Within this context, Bristol negotiated a revised Section 106 package that met some, although not all, of the demands put forward by the developer. The revised position incentivised the developer to deliver the development to their timescale by reducing the Section 106 package by around a third (£4.5 million) if various triggers were reached.

    Contact

    Kate Hartas
    Media and PR officer
    Telephone: 0117 922 2649

    Since I drew attention to the article, I’ve received the tweet shown below from Bristol City Council.

    screenshot of BCC tweet

    On the basis of that tweet, I have a couple of questions for Bristol City Council’s press office.

    1. If Bristol City Council describes a press release bearing this month’s date as ‘ancient’, what counts as modern?

    2. If that press release was released in error as you seem to be implying, is any quality control exercised by your officers before material is released for publication?

    Answers will be accepted in the comments below.

    Update 23/10/13: The following message has been received this morning from Bristol City Council.

    Hi Steve

    I’ve tried to leave a comment on your blog but get a message saying we’re blocked, probably because our work computers are behind a proxy.

    In answer to your questions though, the press release you’re referring to was sent out in Sept 2012, hence our description of it as ‘pretty ancient’. The website it was published on is not in our control but that of the LGA, which recently did technical amendments to the page (not the release) which updated the automatic date shown on their site. After your tweet we drew this to their attention and asked them to remove it as it was old news and could be confusing given the apparent date. The original press release was not an error, it was sent deliberately in Sept 2012. What we can’t control is who posts it where and for how long after.

    I hope this clears it up for you.

    Kind regards
    Tim

    Tim Borrett
    Service Manager, Media
    Bristol City Council

    Thanks Tim. That helps explain the ancient nature of the press release (which you might like to know the LGA’s webmaster still hasn’t taken down. Ed.), but not the matter of why the council’s planning department seems to be working more in the interests of property developers and not for the people of Bristol who pay their wages.

  • An apposite typo?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics

    I’m not a regular reader of the minutes of meetings of Bristol City Council’s Audit Committee. However, there’s an absolute corker of a typographical error on page 3 of the draft minutes of its 24th September 2013 meeting (PDF).

    image of BCC audit committee minutes

    Will anyone down at the Counts Louse (as real Bristolians call or) or City Hall (as the Mayor has renamed it) be eagle-eyed enough to notice?

    Under no circumstances Lord Fraud should not be confused with Lord Freud, a Conservative peer who only pretends to be a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions with responsibility for welfare reform. 😉

  • Guardian latest media outlet to confuse translators and interpreters

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Tech

    The Guardian, immortalised in Private Eye as The Grauniad for its error-prone typographical propensities, now reveals its errors are not restricted to orthography.

    The home page of today’s online edition has a link to an item on machine translation and online translation tools. The perils of machine translation is a topic which has also featured on this blog (posts passim).

    However, the link to the report is illustrated by an image depicting interpreters at work, as the following screenshot shows.

    screenshot from Guardian website

    This means The Guardian is now the latest media outlet in the UK willing to employ illiterates who can’t tell interpreters from translators along with the likes of the BBC (posts passim) and the Bristol Post (posts passim).

    This blog has a handy illustrated guide on the difference between these two sorts of linguists should employees of any of the above organisations need enlightenment.

  • Bristol Post Balls – spelling it out

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Thursday saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone models – the 5C and 5S – when scores of people with more money than sense queued overnight to make an elitist US technology company even richer.

    Naturally the Bristol Post covered it in Friday’s edition as there’s an Apple shop in Bristol’s monument to Mammon otherwise known as Cabot Circus.

    Part of the Post’s coverage consisted of a photo gallery, which featured as follows in its news section.

    screenshot of Bristol Post gallery item

    How does one spell queue? Certainly not how the Post has done.

    This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.

  • Made redundant? No, I was ‘catalyzed’

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics, Social Media

    For decades, managers have been trying to come up with anodyne terms for dismissing people and making them redundant.

    Some of the more common ones are: give someone their notice, get rid of, discharge, terminate; lay off; sack, give someone the sack, fire, boot out, give someone the boot, give someone their marching orders, show someone the door, can, pink-slip; cashier.

    Following this trend, bosses at Bristol City Council have now come up with another, ‘to catalyze’, as evidenced by a mole down the Counts Louse (since renamed ‘City Hall’ by Mayor Red Trousers (posts passim). Ed.) who tweeted the following yesterday.

    screenshot of BCCDisgruntled tweet

    I’m sure all employees of the council are reassured that the management has their best interests at heart by not wanting to hurt their feelings as they’re unceremoniously handed their P45s and shown the door.

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