I love the idea that, instead of a FAQ page there is an ASQ page (Aften Spiert Quaistens) and that you are invited to “juist daff aboot in wir sandpit”. The whole thing is like reading the dialogue sections in a Brookmyre book which makes it ironic that there is no page for Christopher Brookmyre himself amongst the 7,700+ articles. That might not sound a lot, but it puts in at 119 out of the 283 languages that Wikipedia is available in. Not bad considering it isn’t really a language as such.

Looking at the list of languages available one thing did make me smile: the site is available in the Kanuri language, sort of,with only a single article but 4,389 edits! I say ‘sort of’ because this version has now been closed following a community vote with the reason being “the absence of both content and community”.

Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend the Scots version and in particular the page on spellin an grammar. Just don’t blame me if you find yourself getting hooked. It may not be the most kenspeckle language but it is fun. Just remember – Scots isna juist English written wi orra wirds an spellins. It haes its ain grammar an aw. If aw ye dae is tak an English text an chynge the spellins an swap a puckle wirds it’ll juist be Scotched English an no Scots.

Lots of buried treasures – like the 30 August edit of the page about Alex Salmond

Today I had to call BT’s Glasgow call centre and spoke to a Scotish bloke who actually said “the noo”.  Twice.  Sort of.  Really it was more like “the now” but that’s close enough for me.  (Example: “I’ll just have to log into the other system the now to have a look for you”)

I haven’t been so chuffed by a turn of phrase since 1988 when I was in Australia and a native actually said that something was “fair dinkum”.

Predictably, the complaints about the rhyme itself are overwhelmed by complaints that reprimanding the teacher represents ‘political correctness gone mad’.Now I’m not black nor a boy, so I can’t comment first-hand on whether it would make me feel stereotyped as a rapist, with a hint of underage sex.  I’m also neither a young girl nor a rape victim so I can’t comment first-hand on whether I would feel comfortable having a crime against my person trivialised as merely ‘saucy’ – let alone the bizarre suggestion that virgins are somehow missing out on the pleasures of rape, but I’m sure everyone would have been happier with a less provocative mnemonic.

One argument used in support of this teacher is that the rhyme does work and is memorable and so everything is all right.  This is true to the extent that the alternatives offered up are quite frankly poor, but surely somebody could come up with something even more memorable that even black boys and young girls would be comfortable reciting – unless we don’t want them to get involved in electronics?

Wikipedia gives these alternatives, amongst others:

1. Bad boys run our young girls behind victory garden walls
2. Big boys race our young girls but Violet gernerally wins
3. Bye bye Rosie, off you go Bristol via Great Western
4. B B Roy of Great Britain has very good wife
5. Bak bro yeah greasy blubber’s very grabbable, why?
6. Big brown rabbits often yield great big vocal groans when gingerly slapped

The last one has the advantage of also including the last two colours, gold and silver, that most rhymes leave out, but none of them is particularly good and I really can’t see why the Wikipedia article describes No. 5 as easy to remember.

So here’s the challenge.  Use some of the energy wasted in moaning about ‘political correctness gone mad’ to come up with a mnemonic for BBROYGBVGW(GS) that is really easy to remember, so easy to remember that even die-hard racists would prefer to use it.  ‘Saucy’ is fine – but only a definition of saucy that doesn’t class rape as an amusing incident.

I don’t think I can do it, but I’m sure somebody out there can.

• Blair became really obscure,  yet Gordon blew voters, gaining weight, going sideways
• barbecue burning ready – obviously you get blowy violent gales with golden showers

See.  I said I couldn’t do it.  Why not show me up by coming up with a really good alternative.

Maybe not so confused after all.

But only after the list is extended to eleven items and a new number one is inserted to cover “should of” vs “should have”.

Intimidating bikies and packs of hoons who cram into Potts Point in loud cars on weekends are forcing many elderly residents to consider moving elsewhere.

Love the Ozzies’ approach to language though.  Even official bodies are terribly informal.  Remember when Lewis Hamilton was arrested after the Australian Grand Prix?  It was part of an official state government safety campaign called ‘don’t be a dickhead’.

I did a Google search on “should of” just now.  It returned 2.5million results.  The first was from a site complaining about the usage.  So was the second.  In fact the first five results were from grammar blogs, moaning about the usage, and then it went downhill.  I suspect that at least 2,499,900 of the results are from sites where the writers are totally unaware of the error.

1. see. Not too difficult was it?

This is the sort of information that is crying out for presentation in tabular form, and even then it would be hard to work out which is the best deal.  Writing it all out longhand just makes it extremely muddy.  I suspect Vodafone will be happy with that too, along with Tesco, O2 and Orange because this is classic marketing by confusion – just like with any mobile phone plans, gas and electricity tarriffs and broadband connections.  With such intangibles the only way that more than one player can stay in the market is if there is no easy way to directly compare like-for-like costs.

I’m sure Scott Adams wrote about it in one of his books.

Politicians are always a bit of a mixture of ego and altro and you just hope that the altro wins out and that people do the right thing rather than the politically convenient thing.

The thing is I have never heard the word ‘altro’ before.  Of course Cameron is better educated than me so it is likely he knows words that I don’t.  To plug the gap in my vocabulary I looked on Wikipedia. Nothing.  I looked on Dictionary.com and the Meriam-Webster online dictionary. Still nothing.

Assuming it might be a Latin or Greek root for ‘altruism’ I went old-school and looked in the paper copy of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.  Still nothing – although it did give the etymology of ‘altruism’ which is from the Latin ‘alter’ via the French ‘autre’ so it can’t be that.

So either Eton teaches words so obscure they don’t even occur in the massive two-volume Shorter Oxford, or he made it up.  Either is possible I suppose.  I will have to wait until Will Self or Stephen Fry give a verdict I guess.