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North American manglers of the English language have long since adopted the phrase ‘different than’ but I notice that more and more speakers of British English are saying ‘different to’. When comparing things, we are deciding if they differ from each other. Not to or than each other. In the interests of sexual equality the word ‘actress’ has been phased out. One word for one profession. But why didn’t we phase out ‘actor’ instead? I think it’s now time to purge the English language of other gender distinguishing words. Let’s stop saying ‘he’ and ‘she’. Let’s just choose one and dump the other. ‘He gave birth’ sounds strange now, but at one time, so did ‘She is an actor’. The apocalyptic natural disaster in Japan has been compounded by the enormity of the sinister nuclear threat from the crippled power plant at Fukushima Daiichi. These appalling events, still unfolding, gave rise to an entirely trivial observation on my part about nomenclature. They measure radiation dose in sieverts, temperature in degrees, length in metres, power in watts, and so on. The seismic energy released by an earthquake, however, would be expressed for example: ‘magnitude 9.0 on the Richter scale’. Well, you wouldn’t say ‘a distance of 1500 on the metre scale’ or ‘the temperature reached 22 degrees on the Celsius scale’. So when it comes to earthquakes, Why don’t they just say ’9.0 richters’? Liverpool is holding its first official Pride festival. So anybody who feels pride is welcome to attend, I suppose. Er, not really. Pride in what? OK we all know. There’s no need to spell it out. It’s the Liverpool **** Pride Festival. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we? Not proud enough to give it a name, it seems. Which is a shame. The omission of controversial words is a modern trend. It started with the War on ******* Terrorism of course. We became used to that one almost overnight. I can see it developing still further. How about the French government’s proposals to ban the **** ****? Or the British government’s new ***** plan? Talking of government, all right minded people agree that there should be more ******* and ***** MPs in the House of Commons. Those that don’t can ***** with a ******! What’s the definition of ‘organic’? Ten years ago it meant shrivelled spotty vegetables you wouldn’t choose to buy even if they were the last ones in the shop. Not least because they were 50% more expensive. Now everything in the supermarket has its ‘organic’ alternative. Still more expensive, but within range of those people who are not on a tight budget and are keen to save the planet whilst eating healthy food. But who defines what is organic and what is not? Shoppers who assume it means food grown without pesticides or fertilizers need to do a bit of checking if they are not to be misled. Here’s an example: Morrison’s Organic Corn Flakes. On the box it says
Such weasely phraseology would make a home-flipping MP blush. It looks like Manchester’s Urbis gallery might become the home of a National Football Museum instead. Good. Not that I have any appreciation of the game. I watch a football match on TV with the same level of comprehension as our cat. We can both see coloured shapes moving around on the screen but that’s about it. But Urbis has been a white elephant from the start.
… more → I saw this sign today in a Merseyrail station:
Nice to know help is always at hand. They are even more helpful at Levenshulme station in Manchester. The station name is actually shown in Sign Language. 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
I think this sort of confirmation should be extended to other challenging everyday tasks. How about receipts which say
or perhaps on clocks
Congratulations like this don’t cost anything and make the world a nicer place. You have successfully read this blog entry. |
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