West Bromwich

Commonly confused words #3

compass

compasses

Disrespectful grammar?

A comment on Language Log's latest blogpost mentions a rather egregious error carved in stone on a war memorial on the Isle of Wight

The plural of vinyl

..is vinyls. Some idiots have got it into their head that the plural of vinyl is vinyl. You might like to think that this is all tongue-in-cheek, but in fact there are plenty of places on the Web where you can find examples of people peevishly telling off other people for saying "vinyls". Do these people also say "I bought five cheese" or "I bought five beer"? I doubt it very much. And if they do, that's idiotic too.

stupid as*f*ck

To say something is "as /adjective/ as fuck" is low English but hardly out of the ordinary in these uncouth times. By contrast, the word "assfuck" is offensive and rather too Tarantinoesque for most people's tastes. The way that some people blithely mix these two expressions up - well it caused my jaw to drop the first time I saw it. It is difficult to believe that someone could write "Irritated assfuck" or "Sneaking out of the house is fun assfuck" until you actually see it. And there are even people on Twitter with handles like Pretty Assfuck and ImDopeAssfuck. Technically, this is just part of two common phenomena: one is the tendency to join words that should be apart (alot, awhile, everyday) and split words that should be together (paper back, fire man, any thing); the other is the belief that a word must be right because it's in the dictionary (and assfuck *is* in the dictionary) whether it's the right word for the context or not. Microsoft Word has been guilty of exascerbating this problem as people have become reliant on spellcheckers, though I'm not sure that assfuck is in the MS Word dictionary :-)

Literally nuts

Welcome to the "People do it so that's okay then" school of English, Mr Thomas Chivers. His argument goes: some good writers have misused "literally" "so we're wrong to criticise Jamie Redknapp" for doing it.

David Morrison makes a good point in the comments:
Writer and comedian Paul Parry was scathing about the Deputy Prime Minister's slip. He told Today: "This is probably the worst thing Nick Clegg has ever done. He's just completely misusing the word."

He added: "It's not about pedantry, it's about communication. The key thing is the word 'literally' is a safe word.

"We've got a wonderful, floral language. You can say that you've got itchy feet, that you'd kill for a cup of coffee, that you'd bring the house down, that you've got a frog in your throat, but ultimately you need to be
able to show that words have a literal meaning as well.


"There is no other word that means 'literally' and if the word 'literally''s meaning is eroded by all this misuse then there is nothing to replace it and we'll get a lot more confusion."

An oldie at Vue?

Can you move one thing and add three words to correct the sentence?

(Screengrab from myvue.com)

Brace yourselves

Do you know how many a brace is? It's Two. Check the dictionary.

(Screencap is from the BBC Sport website)

Ubercorrect at the Economist

"But who's nastier than whom isn't really the point here."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/defusing-fiscal-risk-0?fsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fbl%2Fhostagetakersorterrorists

Ha Ha

Water logic

So, there I was at the local swimming pool, signing our daughter up for classes, and I had to choose between "Happy" and "Starter". Well, I said, she's never had any lessons, but she's reasonably confident in the water. So then, I'm told, she should do the "Happy" classes. When I query this and suggest that perhaps she should do the beginners' class, I'm told that "Happy" is the beginners' class, and "Starter", er, isn't. I was a bit doubtful, but there on the wall was the evidence...

The future in the past

At the time of writing, it's early August 2011. At the time of our trip to Ikea it was also early August 2011. So, how to explain this notice painted on the cafeteria wall? Well, I suppose we're used to this kind of language from newspaper headlines, whose syntax involves removing bits of what we'd normally say, in order to express something in as few words as possible. Thus, in "Imhotep crowned king next Tuesday" - as in "Your new restaurant completed September 2011" - we're supposed to understand that the "will be" or "is to be" or "is going to be" or "should be" or even "is supposed to be" has been omitted to save space.

Thing is, Ikea darlings, your wall isn't a newspaper. So please write proper English on it that makes normal, everyday sense. Tack.

Walkings welcome

US 'hate groups' boosted by Obama

Really? President Obama is boosting 'hate groups'? Ridiculous link to an important article.

globally, from Russia to Asia

Some men were apparently kept at Guantanamo just for owning one of the world's most common watches. To quote the BBC:


The [Casio] F-91W [watch] instantly proved popular, not least because it was cheap and reliable. The company does not release sales figures for the watch, but says it was - and still is - a "huge seller" all over the world.


"It sells globally, from Russia to Asia," says Tim Gould, head of marketing at Casio UK. "It has consistently remained popular because it is functional, affordable and accurate. It's as simple as that."

...more than punctuation.

Doesn't it?

The French (don't) have a word for it

Jeremy Paxman: "A truly comparable word for 'privacy' simply does not exist in French or Italian, yet in England it is one of the country's informing principles."

1. Guess what: French is not lacking a word for 'privacy'; in fact there are two: l'intimité and le privé.

2. Even if there wasn't a close match in French for our word 'privacy', that wouldn't mean that the concept of privacy was lacking. Italians sometimes prefer to use the English word, speaking, for example, of "la mia privacy", but that says more about how they see us than about their own habits.

Not the Madras branch of Currys

Spot the (spelling) mistake.

that which annoys me

Carol Ann Wilson is 30% right: where there's a comma, only "which" is possible. However, where there's no comma, both "that" and "which" are correct: "The report which I sent last week will be of some help." is a fine sentence. Ignore any guide which tells you otherwise.

mightened of

According to Google, there are 33 examples of "mightened of" in evidence on the Web. (I wonder how many there'll be this time next year?) Although it's pretty stupid-looking, it's forgiveable. After all, how many times have you seen the correct "mightn't've" written down? (Well, only 53 times on the Web, according to Google...) And it looks pretty stupid, too..

Blogpost at Language Log

(Update: It's now 31/8/11 and the current hit total is 114!)

Little Birmingham

There's widespread coverage in the news of the murder in Pakistan of a couple from Birmingham, Gul and Begum Wazir. The BBC version states that the couple were killed in Salehana, "sometimes referred to as Little Birmingham because of its strong ties with the Pakistani community in the West Midlands." Well, that's interesting, I thought, and I proceeded to do a Google search. And guess what? A search on Salehana brings up no results except for 150 versions of this news story, plus a few people's surnames. Wherever this story originated, that journalist was given a spelling but didn't check it. Now, spellings of Pakistani placenames are variable, to be sure, but it's far from helpful to use a spelling that no-one can find on the internet.

So, how did I find the village? Luckily other news sites gave the name of the district* (Nowshera) and I was able to find this site which handily lists all the villages there. Scrolling down the list I found Saleh Khana. Bingo! The Wikipedia entry for the village is wonderful, and I've done a screencap in case they rewrite it now in a more mature manner...

*A district, not a province!