February 25, 2009 by dafyd
This BBC headline confused me for a few moments:
I didn’t think turkeys were flightless (wild, they’re not), so why the plane? Images of Chicken Run came to mind…
Bad bit of journalese there, I think. Not a great idea to associate plasticine poultry with a plane crash, however unintentionally.
Update: The BBC has updated the title to “Jet crashes…” – much clearer.
Category 1 | Tags: bbc,chickenrun,crash,journalists,language,news | Comments Off
August 24, 2008 by dafyd
I just caught this BMW advert, narrated by Donald Sutherland, during the Grand Prix:
Pretty advert, sure, but it’s that last card, the tagline, that annoys me. Any GCSE student – let alone a copywriter at a major agency, working on a huge campaign for a massive client – could tell you that you can’t say “less emissions”. It should be “fewer emissions”, as “emissions” is a countable noun. I’d be perfectly happy with “less gunk emitted”. Even “less gas” would be fine. But absolutely not “less emissions”.
That said, Fowler says that
less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns when these denote something closer to an amount than a numerical quantity, as with distances, periods of time, ages, and sums of money: less than 5 miles to go | less than six weeks | children less than three years old | less than £100
In this context, I suppose, “emissions” is denoting the total amount of gunk being emitted, so this could, feasibly, be correct. I’m not convinced, though – it just seems sloppy to me, using ungrammatical English to fit the meter of the tagline.
The Engine Room (a blog about language, not cars) has an interesting discussion about the same thing…
Category 1 | Tags: advert,bmw,cars,english,grammar,language,video | Comments Off
April 6, 2007 by dafyd
When reinstalling stuff back onto my computer, I (naturally) downloaded and installed the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.3.
Version 2 onwards has built-in support for spell checking, proofing text you enter (here, for example) as you type it. Nifty.
But… the British English dictionary at the Firefox Add-ons directory claims not to be valid with any version of Firefox above 2.0b2. Obviously, I refused to install the American version.
A bit of Googling and 10 minutes later, I fiddled with the dictionary to allow me to install it. So, as a public service, and just to show that I’m not doing nothing all day, here’s a compatible version of the dictionary that will install in the current release of Firefox.
I have just noticed that the dictionary recognises neither “Firefox” (odd) nor “movies” (quite right).
Category 1 | Tags: dictionary,firefox,language | 5 Comments
July 29, 2006 by dafyd
So, we’re nine hours into the Blogathon, and reading back over my last few posts, I can tell I’m getting tired. My prose has started to get a tad rubbish, and some sentences don’t even make sense. Bother.
I’ve not been sleeping terribly well for the last few nights, mainly because of the heat and my hayfever, so I’m coming into this at somewhat of a disadvantage. I think I’ll move downstairs in a bit to be closer to the coffee…
Anyhoo, here’s something that dropped into my RSS reader:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all foreign words from government and cultural agencies. They are now to be replaced with clumsy made-up Persian words.
This may be new in Iran, but it’s something that’s been going on for years in France. In the late 1700s, Cardinal Richelieu established the Académie Française to monitor the French language, and especially to ensure that it didn’t become too threatened by English.
In the 1990s, the French government enacted the loi Toubon (the “Allgood Law”), which forced all media to be in French. Any English used, for example in adverts, had to be subtitled in French. The DGLF (Délégation générale à la langue française) regularly updates its list of forbidden English words, recently expanded to include computers and the internet. This does, of course, create a huge number of stupid phrases… for “webcasting”, for example, the French equivalent is “diffusion systématique sur la toile”. A DVD, of all things, is a “disque numérique polyvalent”.
I think somewhere someone has lost the plot, somewhat. Creating long French equivalents isn’t going to make people use them…
Category 1 | Tags: blogathon,french,language | Comments Off