bad grammar

Too posh to swear: and getting a warm glow in Waitrose

The Pet Peeves thread of the writers’ forum I frequent has now been going strong for an astonishing four months and has passed the 3,000-comment mark, with peeved journos and eds popping up all the time to add their rants about mis-used words and bad grammar.

One of the things that’s been enraging them recently is the irritating use of “less” when “fewer” is meant, and vice versa.

Just as greengrocers’ apostrophes drive the pedantic to distraction, so does supermarkets’ use of “less” (as in “10 items or less at this checkout”).

I remarked that I’d got such a warm glow on seeing the correct “fewer” used in Waitrose that I vowed to shop there again. The grammar-deficient Morrisons, I added, with its insistence on “less items” and its missing apostrophe, could bog off.

This prompted an enquiry from an American as to whether I meant “bug off” as he’d not heard the expression before.

Two other forum members told him no, that was right; bog off is a British English expression. One said I was deliberately making a play on words, what with the supermarkets’ use of “bogof” (buy one get one free) promotions.

Actually, she’d credited me with being more clever than I really am, as this hadn’t occurred to me.

I did learn something new though; “bog off” derives from “bugger off”, according to www.wiktionary.org. Another source, www.urbandictionary.com, offers this amusing definition: “a word upper-middle-class kids that are up their own arse use to say ‘fuck off’ or ‘piss off’ because they are too posh to swear”. This definition cites “Bog off, Dave, stop humping my leg” as being an instance where bog off might be used.

This said it so much better than I could have done, so I threw this definition into the discussion. One of our resident pedants immediately pointed out that that it should read “…kids who are up their own arses”.

Pic  credit: Tungphoto, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1708

Rhubub, Shephards Pie and why journalists are rubbish at sums

Following my rant about the illiterate racist (see previous blog), I had a more gentle laugh at some comical mis-spellings I saw recently. A local farm shop is currently selling “rhubub” while a greasy-spoon café down the road has “Shepards Pie” among its gourmet dishes. Meanwhile, a little old lady round the corner earns some pocket money selling plants on a stall outside her house, including those popular herbs “corinder” and “basel”.

Mind you, it doesn’t pay to be too up-yourself about such things. On the LinkedIn writers’ forum there are a lot of what one contributor termed “pedants, contrarians and grammarians”, who make it their business to contradict even the most apparently well-argued remarks, citing high-brow academic sources on the subject of grammar and making the rest of us feel rather foolish and unscholarly.

Furthermore, those who have a good way with words are often rubbish when it comes to other stuff. While working as a sub-editor I’ve come across journalists who were simply incapable of understanding and correctly interpreting statistics that they’d been given. A good journalist should be aware of the various possible interpretations of statistics, because there might be a really good story hidden in the figures, but some get into such a tizz when confronted with numbers that they take the lazy option of simply parroting the interpretation put on them by the press release. Or worse, they make such a dog’s breakfast of attempting an analytical approach that they end up with a news angle that is plain inaccurate.

Some writers, for instance, don’t know how to calculate percentage increases and decreases correctly, a bit of a handicap when so many stories involve writing about changing figures – in crime, sales, trade, population or whatever. Even worse, one writer – who was supposedly an economist – was so intimidated by monthly import/export statistics he didn’t even bother trying to interpret them – he would merely provide a table of numbers and leave it to the poor sub to try and work out what the news angle was, what the figures meant.

But I’m no mathematician myself. I played in a pub darts team a long time ago and was treated like the village idiot because I couldn’t do the mental arithmetic needed to quickly work out and chalk up the current scores. I had to work it out laboriously in my notebook, by which time the game was finished and the players had retired to the bar. They probably thought that an ability to keep track of a major sporting contest was way, way more useful in everyday life than being able to spell rhubarb.

PS Apologies for the split infinitive, to any pedants, contrarians and grammarians reading.

Circumcision, mis-spellings and “imergrants” taking our jobs

Like most journalists, I love to see mis-spellings and grammatical aberrations in the public domain: it gives us the chance to get all high and mighty about the state of education today and use the immortal phrase “don’t they teach them anything?”

For this reason I’ve been enjoying a current thread in a writers’ forum on LinkedIn, where easily enraged journos like me exchange irrascible remarks about stuff like how rein/reign and alternate/alternative are mis-used, and about whether the “ess” suffix (waitress, sculptress etc) are disrespectful to women.

For some reason I can’t remember – other than that I was a willing participant – the thread strayed off into discussing circumcision (the practice rather than the spelling thereof), prompting a moderator to pop up and tell us to stay on-topic.

One of the contributors to the original debate commented that actually, wandering off into irrelevancies was part of the fun of the forum – provided the remarks were not “ad hominem”. I admit it, I had to look it up. Basically it means attacking the messenger, not the message. A lovely phrase, and one that could come in mighty useful in debates down the pub.

The forum had already added to my vocabulary in other ways, notably with the wonderful “the toothpaste’s out of the tube on this one” and its partner, “trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube”; and the simile “it’s like herding cats”, which oddly enough I heard for the first time only last weekend and jotted down for future use.

Someone on the forum has also explained to my satisfaction the correct usage of “begging the question” – a phrase I’ve always avoided using since, while I didn’t know what it meant, I did know what it didn’t mean. I need to start a debate about the correct meaning of “playing devil’s advocate”, another phrase I steer clear of using because I know it doesn’t mean what everyone, including me, thinks it does.

Anyhow, today, I was able to contribute a memorable quote from another forum which was astonishing not for its racism but more for its lack of literacy.

Someone who appeared to have had other commitments when English was being taught at whatever school he failed to attend had the effrontery to suggest (I paraphrase) that there were too many bloody foreigners coming over here and taking all our jobs.

This is what he said. “Were [sic] opressed [sic] by are [sic] goverment [sic] muslims imergrants [sic] are given the right to live in are [sic] country and treated eaqully [sic] even though there [sic] from Pakistan…”

I kid you not. Imergrants. Yes. The irony of attacking bloody foreigners while quite lacking in fluency in his own native language was probably lost on him – though I did take pains to point it out in a reply to the forum. I got equal numbers of “thumbs ups” and “thumbs downs” for my remark, so am not at all sure whether my brand of pedantry has popular appeal.