I love the fact that, amongst all the different language versions of Wikipedia, alongside French, Spanish, Russian, German, Finnish and all the rest there is a Scottish version of Wikipedia. This is not in Gaelic or anything like that, but written in Scottish dialect. Of dubious actual value, but that is why it is so [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Language'
National stereotypes
June 30th, 2011 · No Comments · Life
Being amused by national stereotypes can be a bit of a minefield, and ethnic stereotypes even more so, but I do like it when I come across something that I had previously though was just a staple of bad impressionists. Today I had to call BT’s Glasgow call centre and spoke to a Scotish bloke [...]
Tags: Language
Black boys rape our young girls?
March 1st, 2011 · 5 Comments · Politics
There is a bit of a stink over a supply teacher in a Crawley school allegedly using a dubious mnemonic to teach the colour coding of resistors. The teaching method in question is a device for remembering the colour sequence black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, grey, white by using the catchy phrase [...]
Special advisors
September 2nd, 2010 · No Comments · Life
With all these stories about William Hague floating around I keep getting confused by headlines, but that is mainly because the term SPAD keeps getting used.  Due to the six years I spent working for London Underground the term SPAD will always mean a train going through a red light (signal passed at danger).  This [...]
Tags: Language
Not just bloggers
July 23rd, 2010 · No Comments · Life
Good advice here from Problogger, but it applies a lot more widely than bloggers and should be mandatory reading for commenters on blogs and newspaper sites and email authors and writers of memos and reports at work. But only after the list is extended to eleven items and a new number one is inserted to [...]
So that’s what happened to Hoon
April 24th, 2010 · No Comments · Life
Geoff Hoon has been low-profile since his attempted overthrow of Gordon Brown and here is the reason – it looks like he has been down under, and in the process has performed some sort of agamogenesis and reproduced himself, judging by the start of the story: Intimidating bikies and packs of hoons who cram into [...]
One for Lynne Truss
February 22nd, 2010 · 4 Comments · Life
I was just wondering. If your wife has two brothers who share a house, or a brother who lives with his civil partner, how do you apostrophise their house? Is it “My brothers-in-law’s house”? I reckon that is right, but it does sound pretty clumsy.
Tags: Language
Should of known better
February 5th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Life
One of pet hates is when people write “should of” instead of “should have”.   While the targets of this site‘s ire are all worthy enough (and thanks to Damian for bringing it to my attention on Twitter the other day) the author should have1 made some room for “should of”. I did a Google search [...]
Tags: Language
The fog of (price) war
December 22nd, 2009 · No Comments · Life, Technology
I think I have found the year’s least readable newspaper story. It is from the Guardian and all about Vodafone’s forthcoming deals on iPhones. The first section is OK, and Vodafone will be happy that their PR line about it not being a price war but a network quality war got included. After that it [...]
Tags: Language·Newspapers
Cameron on faith
November 15th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Life
I’m always a little worried about politicians having strong beliefs in god: you really want those in charge to make decisions based on logic rather than faith after all.  But what caught my eye in this story about David Cameron’s beliefs is not what he says about religion but what he says about psychology: Politicians [...]
Have you heard of the categorisation of political activists into...