Recently in language Category

From the BBC:

Tesco is to change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts to avoid any linguistic dispute.

The supermarket giant is to replace its current "10 items or less" notices with signs saying "Up to 10 items".

Tesco's move follows uncertainty over whether the current notices should use "fewer" instead of "less"

It's good, of course, that they're finally going to change it to something that is grammatically correct. But what's this "uncertainty" over the current phrase? "10 items or less" is obviously incorrect. There's no uncertainty about that at all.

You don't have to be stupid to work for Radio 1. But it often helps.

Someone called Dom, writes on the Chris Moyles show blog:

Now then - the BBC has its own in-house magazine called Ariel. This name is very clever as it can relate to a TV ariel or a radio ariel.

Two basic mistakes here. Firstly if you're talking about a TV or radio antenna, then the correct spelling of "ariel" is "aerial". Secondly, the BBC magazine is called "Ariel" after the Eric Gill statue of Shakespeare's Prospero and Ariel on the front of Broadcasting House.

Makes you wonder what they teach them at school these days.

An email has flooded in about my previous post confirming that I was being too harsh. My correspondent points out that the mother was illiterate, she was just using "txtspk" which, whilst not being a dialect that many people enjoy reading, is still becoming an acceptable language amongst the young.

I don't agree with this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I accept that txtspk is a very common language amongst the young. But I think that an important part of being literate is knowing the appropriate language to use in different circumstances. And, in my opinion, using txtspk when talking about her son like that is inappropriate. To me it shows a lack of respect. I accept that not everyone will agree with me.

But secondly, let's look more closely at what she wrote. The quotation I used was "RIP my lil angel mummy knows your still here love u always and foreva". Some of those errors ("lil", "u", and maybe even "foreva") are clearly txtspk so we'll ignore them. But "your" isn't txtspk (that would be "ur", as I understand it) and it's not good English. She means to say "you're". Mixing up homonyms like "you're" and "your" is what marks her out as illiterate.

Maybe she isn't illiterate. Maybe she's just sloppy. But when all you know about someone is their writing, then you'll obviously judge their level of literacy by what they have written. To me, it's important that my writing gives as good an impression of me as possible. It seems that other people aren't as bothered about first impressions as I am.

By the way, I enjoy getting feedback on my blog in any form. But the best way is to add a comment. That way all of the conversation takes place in public.

The BBC have an interesting report on the baby who was mauled to death by the family rottweiler. The story talks about the child's mother's reaction to the death. It's interesting because of the way that they report what she says.

The quotations from the mother in the story obviously come from two sources - one is is probably a spoken interview and the other is things that she has written on her Bebo profile.

In the spoken interview, the BBC reporter has translated what she has says into standard English. So she's quoted as saying "My boy was my world. He is loved by many. He will always be in our hearts, never to be forgotten". But the Bebo page is quoted verbatim, so we suffer the full force of the mother's illiteracy - "RIP my lil angel mummy knows your still here love u always and foreva".

Oh, I know what you're all thinking (the less cynical of you, at least). You're thinking that I'm being too harsh. That people should be allowed to be illiterate in their grief or that this kind of language is raw or even poetic. I say nonsense. If there's one time in you're life when you want to hang onto whatever dignity that you can, then surely it's when you're in mourning. Going through something like the loss of a child is bad enough at any time. It can only be worse when you're going through it in the public eye as this family are.

Which makes the way that the BBC has reported this seem a bit strange to me. I'm not sure that "woman writes about her dead son on social web site" is really newsworthy anyway, but if you're going to report it you could at least spare the poor woman the embarrassment of her obviously tenuous grasp on the English language.

Or perhaps I am just being too harsh.

If there's one time in your life when it pays to be very careful about what you're saying, then it's when you're answering questions about crimes that you have been accused of. You know, there's that whole "anything you say will be taken down and can be used in evidence against you" thing going on.

So it's depressing to read what Yasemin Vatansever (one of the girls who has been caught smuggling drugs out of Ghana) has to say for herself. At the end of a barely literate phone conversation, the BBC quotes her as saying:

We don't know nothing about this drugs and stuff.

Which, when you think about it, is about as good a confession as you can hope for.

Does no-one speak English any more?

In Leicester Square station last night I saw a Transport for London poster that proudly declared that the work they are currently doing on the network will lead to "less delays".

Do they mean "less delay"? Or perhaps "fewer delays"?

I wonder how many people approved that copy. And none of them knew the difference between a mass noun and a count noun.

Did I miss a memo about English spelling reform? More and more people seem to be spelling ridiculous as "rediculous". Have they all been infected by the same typo? Or is it some street-talk that I'm unacquainted with?

Robert saw this poster and uploaded a photo of it to Flickr. It contains an incredible number of grammatical errors.

Obviously I've got my copy of the new Guardian and I'll have more to say about it later on.

But I just wanted to raise a point about the letters page. They've renamed it "Letters and Emails". Now that makes sense on one level as I assume that a large proportion of the letters aren't actually sent through the post any more.

My issue is with the use of the word "emails". Given that "email" is based on the word "mail" then I'd expect it to follow the same rules. And the plural of "mail" is... well it doesn't really have one. It's a weird noun that is only ever used in the singular. "I got a lot of mail yesterday"[1]. "Email" should follow the same usage.

Which of these sounds better?

"How much email do you get in a day?"
"How many emails do you get in a day?"

"I have too much email in my inbox"
"I have too many emails in my inbox"

I feel a letter (or, rather, an email) to the editor coming on.

[1] Ignoring, for a second, the fact that if you were speaking British English you'd actually use "post" instead of "mail".

When did people stop knowing the difference between adverbs and adjectives? It's becoming common to hear people using adjectives instead of adverbs and it really grates.

There's an example on the BBC new site right now. The headline says "Charles urges society to go slow". Isn't it obvious that the last word should be "slowly"?