Masthead
One of my photos

Entries Tagged as 'Language'

A tedium of collective nouns

July 9th, 2020 · Comments Off on A tedium of collective nouns · Life

I am in a bit of a miserable ranting mood today so I’ll vent a bit about collective nouns. If there is one aspect of language that irritates me more than coy euphemisms it is collective nouns, and especially the newly-minted ones that always seem to be presented as mildly amusing and perhaps faintly satirical.

[Read more →]

Tags:

Nothing new

September 2nd, 2017 · Comments Off on Nothing new · Life, Work

The other day at work I was really chuffed for a couple of hours. Chuffed because I came up with a phrase that I was really pleased with. Only a couple of hours because I Googled my newly-coined term and found that it was not so new after all, and several places were already using […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Some more useful prejudices

August 11th, 2016 · Comments Off on Some more useful prejudices · Life

A little while ago I wrote about some of my favourite prejudices, but it was far from an exhaustive list, and I have a few more things to add to it. Obviously these are just pedantic pet peeves, and I am not going to stop paying attention completely to somebody who, for example, writes”shouldn’t of”, […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Lets hear it for prejudice

May 31st, 2016 · Comments Off on Lets hear it for prejudice · Life

We all like to think we are not prejudiced, but I will happily confess to a few little prejudices. Mind you a prejudice is supposed to be an unreasonable opinion and, like all prejudiced people, I think these are perfectly reasonable and they save time. The first regards outward appearance. I know you should not […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Wordy Rappinghood

July 5th, 2015 · Comments Off on Wordy Rappinghood · Life

No matter how many times I read this I can’t make it make sense: While the process was laborious, for, as is often the case, because the computer systems managers have specified don’t report data of this kind, it resulted in atitudinal changes amongst engineers. I think you have to remove “for” and put the […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

So

November 17th, 2014 · Comments Off on So · Life

The last few months have seen the regular annual influx of new graduate joiners at work, which means two things: a temporary tendency for the building to smell of Lynx and a permanent increase in the number of people who start every answer to a question with the word “so”. This habit used to be […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Being a pioneer

April 20th, 2014 · 3 Comments · Life, Politics

I don’t usually join the Daily Mail/UKIP  rant about political correctness gone mad or nanny state health & safetyism. As Stewart Lee says, political correctness is basically just being polite and respectful, and as far as H&S complaints are concerned I always want to ask the complainer whether it is safety or health that they […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Terminology

August 18th, 2012 · Comments Off on Terminology · Technology

Quick question: what to you call one of these? I have captioned it as a USB stick, but they are also called flash drives, pen drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, USB memory cards, and various combinations of those names. How is it that a device can become so ubiquitous so quickly and we can’t even […]

[Read more →]

Tags: ·

It isn’t even a real word

July 12th, 2012 · 1 Comment · Life

In these austere times I’m sure we all find ourselves leaning away from brands a little bit and towards supermarket own label foods. One thing I’m eating at the moment is ASDA ‘Wheat Bisks’ but seeing the box something struck me: the name doesn’t actually mean anything officially. Look up ‘bisk’ inthe dictionary and all […]

[Read more →]

Tags: ·

Guid tae see ye

December 7th, 2011 · 4 Comments · Life

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 […]

[Read more →]

Tags: