musings

Seems like the whole world is going forward. I don’t just mean the latest business-speak for ‘in the future’. I am talking about the expression ‘forward slash’ when quoting a URL.

I don’t mind that the British word ‘stroke’ or ‘oblique stroke’ has universally been replaced by the American word ‘slash’. But not ‘forward slash’, please!

It’s bad enough that media presenters and advertisers say ‘logon to …’ when they mean ‘visit …’ a website. Why not just say ‘slash’? You don’t say ‘I was in my car, driving forwards’, do you?

Gordon Brown has been reshuffling his cabinet. Why is it always called a reshuffle? It’s just a shuffle, isn’t it?

I got a real sense of achievement this morning. I logged out of a website and got this message

You have now successfully logged out

I think this sort of confirmation should be extended to other challenging everyday tasks. How about receipts which say

You have successfully purchased something

or perhaps on clocks

You have successfully checked the time

Congratulations like this don’t cost anything and make the world a nicer place. You have successfully read this blog entry.

Have you ever noticed the way we refer to rivers? In Europe, we have the River Danube, the River Seine, the River Thames. You could say the Thames River but it’s more usual to put the name second.

In the rest of the world, it is more usual to put the name first, as in the Colorado River, Potomac River, Athabasca River, Volga River, Yangtze River, Murrumbidgee River etc.

So, there’s simple rule of thumb: name first, except in Europe.

Er, except the River Nile …

Whilst waiting at Stockport rail station yesterday I heard each train announced thus:

The next train to arrive to platform one will be …

Arrive to? What happened to “arrive at” or “arrive on”?

Is this a national thing? Maybe it is peculiar to Stockport. After all, there aren’t many stations which have a platform zero. Stockport does. They were obliged to designate the new platform “zero” when they added it next to platform one. If Stockport station is expanded further, we could get a platform minus one.

Years ago, the British telephone organisation (now BT, but formerly the General Post Office or GPO) got into trouble when its bean counters decreed that operators should not end the call with a thank you or goodbye, because that took time, and time is money. There was a public outcry at this hard-nosed attitude to manners, and the decision was reversed.

Now we have BT Answer the free automated call answering service. There is nobody really there of course, but the system talks to us using a recorded woman’s voice. She tells us if we have no messages, or if we do have messages, she introduces each one and afterwards presents us with options to delete, listen again, save or return the call. All very clever, but so commonplace that we don’t give this sort of thing a moment’s thought any longer. And with familiarity comes … impatience.

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