Furthermore
I like to think that I’m not too much of a language snob, but suspect that I am really. I certainly feel my hackles rise when words are used incorrectly, but especially by people who should know better.
I was in our local supermarket this morning and decided to browse the paperbacks, picking up The Map by T S Learner. It looked like the typical conspiracy thriller that I enjoy, but I nearly didn’t buy it after reading the blurb on the back cover.
Job Lottery
The BBC ran a story yesterday about three street cleaners in Edinburgh who have been temporarily reinstated after they were chosen for redundancy by drawing names out of a cereal bowl.
Edinburgh Council needed to get rid of seven of their 13 agency staff. They managed to select four based on their performance, but couldn’t separate the remaining nine, so a manager decided that drawing lots was the fairest solution.
B is for Backing Britain
| My contribution to ABC Wednesday which for Round 10 I am focusing on people from the past. |
Although I mean to focus on interesting individuals from the past for this round of ABC Wednesday, this post is about an entire nation who briefly joined the I’m Backing Britain campaign of 1968.
It was a time with echoes of today − the economy was weak, the national debt was high and Britain was a country full of anxiety and despondency.
Lost in Translation
The Babel fish is one of the great literary devices; a fish that ‘feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain.’
Douglas Adams created it for H2G2 as a universal translator since ‘the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language’.
Please Be Offended
Isn’t life dull at the moment? You can tell that there isn’t much of interest going on when the Telegraph headlines complaints about a Jay Leno joke.
I think that an online petition of 2,000 names out of the 15 million Sikhs in India amounts to little more than a storm in a cup of Darjeeling, but make up your own mind.
By and Large
One of the things that has struck me watching the US primaries and caucuses is the way the word ‘republican’ has different connotations on either side of the Atlantic.
If you’re a US Republican with a capital R, it means that you are rather conservative, religious and believe in traditional values (click the graphic), whereas in the UK, being a republican with a lower case R marks you as a lefty liberal rebel.
Going Dark
I went on strike yesterday in support of the poor and downtrodden that is Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.
Not that I expect that anyone noticed, least of all the present and/or future incumbent of the White House, but it’s the thought that counts.
A is for Angelsey
| My contribution to ABC Wednesday which for Round 10 I am focusing on people from the past. |
For this round of ABC Wednesday, I thought I would focus on people from the past, some famous, others less so, but hopefully all interesting in one way or another.
Starting with the flamboyant 5th Earl of Angelsey, who “seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.”
Nightmare
It’s a while since I wrote a book review which isn’t surprising as I haven’t read much of late, but one title very much on my pre-order from Amazon list was Nightmare, the third in Stephen Leather’s Jack Nightingale series.
I’ve written about the previous two novels here and here, so I’ll make my precis of the story so far as brief as I can.
Jack Nightingale is a former police negotiator whose life changes when he fails to prevent a nine year old girl from committing suicide.
Missing Inaction
It isn’t like me to go without posting for so long, but we had an exhausting, sleep-deprived week last week that had me otherwise occupied.
The problem was the course work that my daughter had to complete over the Christmas holiday for the first part of her TEFL degree. It was an enormous task.
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