100TWC - Day 26: Forever and a day

Try as I might I cannot get past the hyperbole of this topic. "Forever and a day" might only be "one of those sayings" to most people, but to a dyed-in-the-wool pedant like me it's an irritating reminder of how meaning is lost through overuse, or how casually words are thrown around without, it seems, conscious thought.

Forever is, by definition, infinite. It means the same as eternity. The whole of time. And, as with all infinite numbers, adding one to them doesn't make any difference. Forever and a day is, literally, no longer than forever. So while the massed populace thinks they're expressing something that means they're going the extra mile, doing something more, making a special effort, actually all they're communicating is their paucity of imagination or understanding.

Here's another: 110%.

I gave it 110%. No you didn't. You can't. If you've somehow managed to do more than you did last time, all that means is you gave less than 100% last time. Or alternatively, that your capacity to give was smaller back then, and you gave 100% at that time, and THIS time you have an increased output and you're giving 100% of that. In the same way that eternity, or forever, means the whole of time, 100% means the sum total of whatever it is you're talking about.

Imagine eating 110% of a cake. It's impossible, right? Once you've eaten 100% of the cake there is no more cake. Unless you've hidden a second cake somewhere and you've stuffed 10% of that down your gullet as well. But that's a different cake. It's not an extra 10% of the first cake. That would be like having your cake and eating it too. Which if I was feeling like writing another diatribe on physics might lead me on to a debate about the impossibility of creating (or destroying) matter (or energy). But I won't stray down that path.

In fact since I've been sitting here staring at the screen for the last two minutes with not even an extra 1% of an idea of where to take this argument next, it appears I'm not going to be straying down any path. Even the one I thought I was on. Maybe I should just call it a day. Since I've been arguing against ever saying "forever and a day" we could agree that the "day" we're going to call it is the day we've just subtracted from "forever and a day."

Makes no difference to me. Or you for that matter. Because in the same way you can't add a day to forever, you can't take one away either. Infinite numbers, eh? I could write about them forever...

Corporate bollockspeak

A quiet week on the kitchen front (silent, actually), so I thought I'd share some examples of talking bollocks that I found buried in a comments thread on one of the sites I read regularly.

Phrases that those attempting to climb the greasy pole litter their conversations with, in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, when in fact all they achieve is a demonstration of their scroteworthiness.

"Quantum leap"
Bandied about to mean a fundamental, radical change, but in reality an inconceivably small distance.

"Critical mass"
Clever manager types use this to mean the gathering together of sufficient resources (er, people) to complete a task in the optimum time. It's original meaning is the minimum quantity of something that is guaranteed to make it fly apart catastrophically.

All for now. Feel free to contribute.

Stunning Lines

I've written almost two dozen original songs, so I know from personal experience that some lines stand out as being especially memorable, poignant, apposite, meaningful, moving, or beautifully crafted. And unless you're a particularly gifted songwriter, those really good, stand-out lines are few. I reckon probably three in my case, so far, and I'm probably being generous to myself. I bet everyone can think of at least a couple from their favourite songs that really grab their heart and give it a squeeze.

Never mind, I'll find someone like you.

Adele has been all over the UK and world media for the last four years or so, but nothing quite prepares you for the quality of the songs - all the songs - on her second album: 21. For me though (and apparently, since 21 has only been out a little over a month and sales are already in the hundreds of thousands, for many others too), even among the many gems on this album that single line from the chorus of Someone Like You is one of the most breathtakingly, heart-achingly powerful I've ever heard.

So few words to crystallise the loss of hope, the final realisation that love has gone, but even while it's leaving you don't wish any hurt for the other even though you're hurting. You loved them that much. Never mind. Don't worry about me. All I need to do is find another you. Simple.

The power of the words is, of course, multiplied by Adele's amazing performance. If you haven't seen it I suggest you get yourself over to YouTube sharpish. You'll be glad you did. But it is the words that do it for me every time. The album insert credits Adele Adkins and Dan Wilson as co-writers. Top job guys. It really is a line I wish I'd written.

Sorry?

I was due a broadband upgrade before Christmas, but at the eleventh hour the upgrade was postponed owing to some technical glitch or other.

The email informing me of the delay was very polite, until it came to the final sentence.

"Sorry for any incontinence," they wrote.

Stuff my Mum said

We've all heard of "Shit My Dad Says", right? Well, you can Google it if you haven't. What? You want me to do everything for you? Good grief. Alright: here.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Well my Mum doesn't say much these days that's worth reporting. It's not like she's as clued up as that guy's dad. But way back when I was a kid she used to say a bunch of weird shit. I mean, I was fifteen before I discovered who "our Side" was. I thought he was some fat bloke my Mum used to know. Whenever she saw a really fat person she'd say he (or she) was as fat as our Side.

Who was he - a long lost relative or something?

No. It was me not hearing properly. What she was really saying was that they were as fat as a HOUSE side.

The fun gets funner

More work-time language fun, this time from one of our... no... I'll stick to my Principles of Anonymity. This arrived in an email yesterday:

... as far as I am a ware...

What? As far as you are an illegally-obtained piece of software? As far as you are a piece of pottery? As far as you are an ethnic native of Tanzania? As far as you are a small town in Hertfordshire? No, dear boy. You are aware. Or rather, you ain't.

Say what?

A lifetime love of language occasionally manifests itself in mild amusement at the verbal knots tied in the sentences of others, malapropisms and general mis-speaking. Mild internal amusement, I should add. It's not my style to wag fingers and snort with derision or anything like that. I don't get pleasure from others' embarrassment(*).

So there'll be no names or other identifying material in my relating a comment from a colleague on a recent voice conference, when describing how his current project was going:

It's got a status of 'quo'

I wonder where they get it from sometimes.

(*) Note: I don't count forum dwellers. I'll wag fingers, snort, pick apart, ridicule, correct, bang on about apostrophes and generally not give any quarter when I'm on a forum. It's all part of the fun. Besides, they deserve it.

English as she is spoked

As you might expect, with being a writer, I love the English language. Not just the wealth of vocabulary or the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, but its fluidity. It's ability to change and grow, adopting new words from other cultures and adapting existing ones to meet new needs.

Sometimes, the invention of new words, which can sometimes appear to be a full-time job for the tabloids, works really well. One of the best examples that springs to mind is "squarial" - a type of satellite dish introduced by British Satellite Broadcasting in the late eighties which was, you guessed it, both square and an aerial. As with most things these days, there's a Wikipedia page on it if you're interested, but the point of mentioning it is that it was a newly-coined word that, for me, worked really well because it correctly and succinctly described exactly what it was. Sadly the word, like the thing it described, became defunct in 1990 with the demise of BSB.

And also sadly, the phrase "works really well" can't be applied to all new words. Especially words like the one I heard on the radio today: nanobreak.

Intended to mean a short break (holiday) - one shorter than a weekend break, i.e. one night - it fails at the most basic level. The level of naive use of a term that has a specific, scientific meaning. "Nano" is an SI prefix meaning one billionth of something, as in: nanometre - one billionth of a metre. It also has widespread usage in relation to things on a nanometre scale, such as nanoengineering, nanotechnology, etc, but unfortunately it is also entering the popular consciousness as a "cool" way of saying "very small."

But, see, the problem I have with it, and the thing that made me roll my eyes in exasperation at the kind of marketroid thinking that does this to English, is that a nanobreak would be WAY shorter than a one-night stay somewhere. A nanobreak would be a billionth of a break. So assuming the measure "break" relates to what most people take as their annual holiday - two weeks (in which case, incidentally, a one-week break could be referred to as a semi- or demi-break) - then taking a nanobreak would involve going on holiday for 0.0012096 seconds.

Mind you, a lot of my holidays feel as though they've been that short, on the day I go back to work.

Not to mention the fell ratio

While I'm on a linguistic roll, I caught the tail end of summat on Radio 4 yesterday (Word of Mouth, to be precise) on the subject of arcane English spellings and what a barrier they are to learning the language. I found it interesting as spelling has always been a strength of mine (to the extent that some of my colleagues refer to me as "the human spellchecker"), something I feel is important, and as such what I thought was the "modern" trend against teaching spelling in schools, or at least not correcting it when wrong, sat very uncomfortably with me when my children started school.

Well it seems the tide is turning, and received wisdom is coming full circle. After years of schools not concentrating on spelling, universities are rebelling against a tide of students whose use of language is so poor they can barely make themselves understood, and industry is suffering from a generation of semi-literate youngsters incapable of generating a professional-looking document or presentation. Despite 30-40 years of laissez-faire in the classroom on the subject of spelling, good English is still seen as a marker of educational attainment.

This is causing something of a backlash from those teachers concerned for their students in the lower ability ranges, for whom the unruly spelling of many English words is a hurdle they find hard to leap. It was this aspect (among others) that Word of Mouth spent some time discussing, and which I found so interesting - mainly because the difficulties that it poses had never affected me, so it was something I'd never really thought about.

To spice up what is essentially a dry subject, the programme had invited someone who campaigns for spelling reform - a woman deeply passionate about the scars of humiliation inflicted on the hapless learner - to explain the problem. Some of the facts and statistics she presented were quite illuminating, leaving aside the hyperbole with which she described the "injustice" of forcing children to learn English spelling - comparing it to the Victorians sending them down mines and up chimneys and implying that it is something which in these more enlightened times should be dispensed with.

The problem is, English uses far more discrete spellings of language sounds - graphemes - than other languages. Graphemes are the written representation of phonemes - standard vowel and consonant sounds plus combinations like ea; ou; sh; ch; etc.

Most European languages have around 50 graphemes. English has 114.

It's quite common for phonemes to have more than one grapheme - i.e. there's more than one way to represent the same sound - but what makes English so much more complicated is that the reverse also happens frequently. In 49 cases the same grapheme is used to represent more than one sound - for example 'ea' in treat, threat and great.

These are referred to by language teachers as "tricky" words - words which can't be learnt by following simple rules. Bright children start learning these tricky words right from the beginning but for those on the slower side, they're too hard and pose real problems. The speaker reckoned there are 3,695 common English words that cannot be spelled by rule. Things like

very - merry
arrive - arise
ballad - salad

1,000 of the tricky words involve doubling or not doubling a consonant, and their correct spelling has no connection with the "rule" about a double consonant keeping a vowel short (as in dinner/diner). The presenter argued that this is a relatively simple problem to overcome, whereupon the teacher suggested that while it may not be so bad for words pairs such as latter/later, what happens when you encounter lateral?

It was clear the presenter, Clive Rosen, wasn't convinced. Italian is well recognised as a "regular" language, he argued, but the same literacy problems exist in Italy, where a sizeable percentage of the population still struggle with reading.

Sadly while the programme expressed the problem eloquently enough, little time was devoted to any potential solution. The lady's campaign to reform English spelling would, for instance, see all the different ways of spelling the 'ee' sound in the language (leave; sleeve; receive; evil; magazine; siege; aesthete; ...) replaced with just one. But this is just one change. Does anyone really beleeve that this is a change that could actually bee introduced among the 600+ million English speekers in the world with any degree of success? We're talking peeple of all age ranges, not to mention ree-writing all the spell checkers, signposts, reeprinting all the books, and editing the overwhelming majority of the billions of Internet pages.

And that's even before considering the opposing view - that existing spellings reflect the origins of the language and make English what it is. It can't be *that* hard, surely, if it still enjoys such widespread usage?

A more realistic solution to my mind would involve the development of more effective teaching techniques targeted at lower ability levels. Avoid the kind of embarrassment the guest speaker was alluding to; devote more time, and earlier, to tricky words (as the more able students do naturally already); introduce more fun elements to the traditionally tedious subject. At least such changes would be restricted to the 4-11 age range, rather than forcing the entire population to relearn something we each already have such a heavy personal investment in.

(and of course, we're all familiar with these, aren't we? ;o))

I'd rather be a cunning linguist

Taro 9 (made by BBC Wales to be broadcast tonight on S4C) asks the question: Is bilingualism the way forward?

"For decades the status of the Welsh language has sharply divided opinion in Wales but in Belgium it looks like a row over language is set to tear a nation in two," says the press release, going on to describe the controversy caused by Milford Haven politician Eric Harries who dared to suggest that limited resources are being wasted by the legal requirement to publish all council documents in Welsh as well as English (you can read the rest of it here).

In Belgium, differences between the Dutch speakers in Flanders to the north of the country, and the French speakers, primarily from Wallonia in the south, are threatening to literally split the country in two, wiping Belgium clean off the map.

I'm reminded of the conversations I've had in the past with Canadian friends regarding the resentment they feel as a result of their own legal requirement, historically imposed on the entire country by the relatively small province of Quebec, to have both English and French descriptions on all packaged goods and many public signs, and to be forced to learn French in "immersion" classes. And also of recent debates in the UK about the relative merits of publishing, for instance, medical leaflets in a variety of ethnic languages (Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, etc) as opposed to insisting that settlers in this country learn to speak and read English.

We often joke about America and England being divided by a common language, but there is more uniting us (especially in our use of English) than separates us, and certainly within a single country, it seems that one of the attributes that defines a country as a country is its common tongue.

If a country like Belgium, which to once again quote from the BBC press release is referred to as being "...regarded the world over as a symbol of co-operation and European unity", can be divided by language then surely the message is clear. One country: one language.

Word Search

We receive quite a few free sheets round here, and most of them are thrown away unread. Occasionally though, one or other of us will find ourselves with a few minutes to waste - waiting for the cafétiere to steep for instance - while one of the rags is still lying around. Today was one such day and led to unintentional hilarity that had us holding our sides to prevent imminent splitting.

The free sheet in question was the "Alexandra News" ("St. Edmund's and S. James' Church - sharing God's love in the Community"). This edition offers a Coffee Break word-search puzzle on the back to keep the kiddies amused:

Oops! Proof read fail. You'll see FART in there as well, although that's just an unfortunate side-effect of having one of the legitimate answers - TRAFFIC - arranged backwards on the line.

Win a what?

"Win a Smeg fridge!" screamed the headline in today's Metro.

Personally, I prefer to wash the stuff away, not keep it in cold storage.

Just wordling along

Well I just had to didn't I? Seeing as my better half had one, my world(le) wouldn't be complete without one

You can click on that to see the words in all their glory, and if you'd like one of your own, pop along to those lovely people at Wordle and make one for yourself. It's ever so easy.

Friday's were made for this kind of thing. Let's face it, they're not much good for anything else!

The Gunt

Reviewing our photos from our recent 3-day trip I came across this gem. The sight of this sad old cinema as we walked along the sea front at Weston- super- Mare gave us all a fit of the giggles. I thought at first it had started life as The Gaumont and the G had slipped, but a closer examination reveals the original name to have been The Regent. Nowadays however, with an R and two Es missing, it revels in the surreal title The G'nt (which of course simply begs to be pronounced "Gunt").

We spent a breathless few minutes discussing how locals would say "been to the Gunt lately?" or "Coming down the Gunt tonight?" or "what's on at the Gunt this week" etc etc.

What did you was like?

Seems to be a bit of a week for ranting, but I overheard a couple of kids talking the other day and it reminded me that we're shortly going to see the disappearance of the verb "to say." Simply because young people don't "say" anything these days. They "was like" it. Listen to them for a few seconds and you'll see what I mean.

"I saw Kevin, right, and he was like 'where you bin?' and I was like 'dahn Mickey's' and he was like 'yeah? What's happ'nin'?' and I was like..."

You get the picture. >sigh<

I heart you? Gimme a break

I've bemoaned the parlous state of English usage on here before, but I've seen this several times recently and for some reason it really bugs me.

OK, OK, I know English is a "living" language and that's part of its strength and yadda yadda, but another part of its strength is its rules. Years ago - why it may even be "thirty years ago" - we started to see these cute little bumper stickers with the heart on. I love New York they said and we all knew it and more to the point we all said it. The heart was just an original and cutesy way of saying love. It wasn't literal.

And now? Everywhere you look people are writing "I heart you." I heart this, I heart that. It's flippin' meaningless you morons. Heart is not a verb. You can no more heart something than you can kidney it. Get a grip. It's not big and it's not clever. And even more importantly, it's not English.

The five minute chunk

Have you noticed how everyone tends to divide time into five minute chunks? No? When someone asks you how long it will take to, say, walk from the station to your office, or any other walk you're familiar with, what do you tell them? Ten minutes? Fifteen? What if it's a walk you do every day, and you *know* it takes almost exactly 12 minutes?

You don't say "12 minutes" do you? Because no-one is that precise. If you did, they'd look at you all peculiar and say something like "give or take 22 seconds." They wouldn't say it, but they'd definitely imply you were being a bit anal, or at least overly analytical, just for knowing the exact time it takes to walk a walk you're intimately acquainted with. No, you don't say 12 minutes. You might think "well hey, I walk a bit slow, so he might do it in ten, or he might hit a bad run of traffic lights and not be able to cross, so it might be 13 or 14" and so you round up. You don't want him to rely on an underestimate and end up being late. You tell him it's a fifteen minute walk. If you want to bracket it, you'll do this in five minute chunks too. "It's about a fifteen minute walk, twenty tops."

It's nothing like twenty minutes! If he was recovering from a broken ankle he could do it in 16. But those minutes between 15 and 20 are lost to you. Too precise.

I really should stop thinking about this stuff.

A Damp Squid

I love malapropisms. We recently gained a new character - Honey Mitchell - on the soap EastEnders here in the UK who is unintentionally hilarious with her misuse of words. It takes a gifted writer to invent malapropisms that are actually funny, but the real hilarity for me is when it happens in real life. I was listening to a news package on the radio today about how large supermarkets are deliberately making life harder for smaller retail outlets. Nothing new there, you might think, and true enough it's been going on for a while. So much so that the Office of Fair Trading are now looking into it. The case under discussion in the package was a small retailer who had recently opened a new branch. The opening happened several months after the local branch of Tesco's had been refurbished, but Tesco's chose this guy's opening week to leaflet the whole community and draw their brand spanking new premises to everyone's attention. In the words of the small shop owner, this turned his opening ceremony into "a damp squid."

ROFL! Squids are meant to be damp ;o)

Another classic that has now been virtually accepted into the language is "Early Doors." I would hate to be an etymologist in a hundred years time trying to unravel the meaning and provenance of that phrase. Similarly, if "damp squid" gained currency, who would ever guess that it was originally a corruption of a "damp squib?"

Incidentally, my Nikki has been rating her life so I thought I'd have a go. How does yours rate?

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	8
Mind:	7.1
Body:	5.1
Spirit:	7.6
Friends/Family:	6.9
Love:	9.1
Finance:	7.9
Take the Rate My Life Quiz