illusion

[peterbirks]

"Hello? Is that Mr Birks?" asked a woman with a curious accent just after I picked up the telephone.

Gawd, I thought, another cold call.

"Yes", I said, as non-committally as possible, ready to place down tbhe phone and walk away.

"I'm phoning on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. It's about your collusion."

"My what?"

"Your collusion. Last October".

Heavens, I thought. I knew that the poker sites were clamping down, but I wouldn't have thought that they would have called in the police. Although, if they had, it was unsurprising that they should pick on someone completely innocent.

"But I haven't been involved in any collusion."

"Not last October?"

"Not ever."

"With a bus?"

"Oh, COLLISION."

"Yes, your collusion, with a bus. We wanted to ask whether you were happy with the Metropolitan Police's handling of the incident."

"Er, well, it wasn't the driver's fault. I said so, and three weeks later the police sent me a letter saying that no action would be taken against the driver. That was it."

"The survey would take about eight minutes. would that be okay?"

"So, you want to waste eight minutes of our time on something which I have summarised in 10 seconds?"

"So, you don't want to take the survey?"

"No."

"OK. Thank you very much, and goodbye."

"Goodbye."

So, another helpful use of taxpayers' money, when they should be out there catching criminals, rather than surveying us with how happy we are with their response to an incident where they didn't really need to be called.

++++++++++


To the dentist yesterday for a check-up on whether my upper teeth have expanded. I can't say that they feel as if they have, although when I look at them in the mirror I detect a slight change in the shape. One of the fittings had worked loose, so I got a second chance of tasting the glue, which is apparently meant to be rather unpleasant, but which didn't bother me.

The surgeon was, at last, there at the same time as my X-Rays. He had a look and said "well, much as I love doing this kind of thing, I think we should just take out the baby teeth and wait a couple of months to see whether the impacted canines come through of their own accord. My hunch is that, with the brace providing the gap, it's likely that one of them will, while the other won't.

Which gives me another couple of months without the gold chain hanging on my upper gum like some kind of serious rapper bling. This Friday I'm having the two baby teeth out and then, the week after the extractions, the braace is being fitted. So we have progress at last.

The stress of the past week had brought some ulcers out on my lip, which isn't helped by the metal sitting in the roof of my mouth. MedJel is a ghastly pastille that does at least contain some local anasthetic. I wonder if you could somehow distill it out and turn it into some kind of class-A drug (reminiscent of the plan in Phil Dick's A Scanner Darkly to extract some kind of drug from 99-cent aerosol cans).


It's cold. I'll probably be collecting the car on Thursday in a raging blizzard. Christ, if I wanted Canadian weather, I'd move to Alberta.

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

I was ranting silently (I hope) this lunchtime about the increasing incidence of malapropism. I'd spotted "thriving" for "striving" in a magazine, which is the second time I've seen this particular one. As I descend pell-mell into full-blown Grumpiness, things like this are setting me off more and more.

And this isn't cold. Edmonton, Alberta, is -15C right now (range is -21 to -12) according to Yahoo! which is chilly. Chicago, when I was there in Jan '01, was -20C. That's distinctly nippy.

I feel slightly better now.

Mike

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, but the point is probably mute (sic).

My current top three bugbears are:

1. People who pronounce the letter H as "haitch" - if Mike wants to earn full membership of the Grumpy Old Men club he needs to address this, though I did get a well reasoned e-mail from someone who'd read a rant about this on the Fiendish Games web-site who argued that "haitch" is just as valid, based on some etymological argument. I don't care about etymology - "haitch" is just plain wrong, and that's all there is to it!

2. People who spell "definitely" as "definately". I wonder how they spell "definition"? Does it even occur to them that the two words are connected? My guess would be that this is now in the top 10 most commonly misspelled words in the (British) English language, possibly even top 5.

3. The incorrect use of the word "innit". I am not adverse to use of colloquial terms; it brightens our speech up a bit, d'nit? It's practically compulsory for a Londoner to seek verification of his statements at the end of every line, innit? Yet, when someone says something like "I was round my mate's house yesterday, innit?" I feel compelled to interrupt and say, "Why, of course, you were in it, otherwise you would have said: 'I was outside my friend's house yesterday, wunni?'"

My progeny can't understand why this vexes me so. I tried to explain that, for me, someone using the wrong word has the same jarring effect as a singer hitting a bum note. "Innit" is the wrong word, I explained; they might just as well be saying "potato" at the end of the sentence. Since when, of course, it has become the norm in our household to say things along the lines of "I was late for school yesterday, potato?"

Clearly I am "banally retentive".


John H.
http://my.opera.com/fiendishgames/blog/

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about the "innit" use myself. Clearly for the white south Londoner, "innit" is a contraction of "isn't it". But, via the black population in said area, "innit" seems to cover for "didn't I" as well. Or, to put it another way, any tag on the end of the sentence to confirm the previous action.

As such, of course, it becomes merely a noise to interject between half-comprehensible sentences, in an unsuccessul attempt to disguise how inarticulate the speaker really is.

The level of inarticulacy amongst Americans on the poker sites is truly petrifying -- mainland Europeans playing on these sites nearly always speak (and write) English far better.

I am far more vexed by bad writing that causes potential ambiguity, because this indicates laziness of thought and can, in the wrong circumstances, lead to death (see the recent court case where UK forces were shot at by American pilots). That the peasants are inarticulate is a given, and I just ignore them, because they have nothing of any worth to say. But when people who matter start writing badly, you worry for the future.

PJ

Saurigh' , inni?

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I don't think bad writing caused the blue-on-blue deaths. (Ironic, really, since the colour in question was orange. And since when did we become better than the US Military at meaningless euphemism? What was their phrase -- "inadvertent fratricide?") I believe you will find that it was, in order,

(1) Ludicrously bad "intelligence" from the Forward Position guy, who I seem to recall was actually embedded in a British formation.
(2) I presume the usual MoD stinginess in organising proper comms equipment. How many times should the guys on the ground have to call on the radio before some moderately intelligent, Commodore-64 sized system can route the message through to the appropriate authority? I mean, one strafing is understandable. A second one is not far short of criminal negligence.
(3) The inexplicable prevalence of the hitherto unknown syndrome of "orange-blue" color-blindness in the US National Guard. (And let's not try to think about why a State-based national guard would ever need something as lethal as an A-10, shall we?)
(4) Auto-suggestion in the heat of battle by the two pilots involved.

Actually, I may have got the list inverted. (And 3 was a joke anyway.)

I don't have any particular favourites, sticking points, or bugbears, in written English, much less in spoken English; although I have incorporated Kingsley Amis' stricture on separating lists with commas between each item in the first sub-clause here, because it makes sense to me. Almost all badly-written English, which means 99% of the available evidence, makes me wince. (Did you notice the annoying American mis-spelling of 'colour' up there?) Punctuation: too. I would possibly except the egregious Americanism, "analyze," which offends me to the core; but even there, I can understand the error, and have some idea of it's history. (Yup, or should I say, indeedy-doody, I've just done it again. On porpoise.)

The problem is: all this crud just gets in the way. In fact, the more you know about language, the more it gets in the way. I know what people mean when they say "different to/from/than." It doesn't stop my brain from slipping a metaphorical gear and thus mangling the occasional tooth on the way to completing the sentence. It does, however, and this is really the only valid judgement, corrupt and obscure the flow.

(And people who matter -- a rather elitist judgement there -- have always written badly. Pick a random homme serieux from the eighteenth century, for example. Don't even *think* about earlier centuries, such as Richard III, who is on record as sending a postcard to his Aunty Eleanor saying "Deer Q, I done a gud thing tooday. Me nefewes came roudn, an the towre woz knakcerin' cold, sew I bort em a pillow eech two put em two slipe. Luv 2 Coz Edna en the kidz.")

But I digress. Write simply; write often. Orwell had it about right, I think.

The other thing I've noticed recently -- and this is often whilst reading computer blogs, which have a rich history of pointless and unmoderated yelling at other correspondents for supposed errors that are entirely off-topic -- is that Americans are now co-opting the "bad English makes for little minds" argument and using it to suggest that their opponent "obviously isn't a native English speaker."

I leave it to your readers to untangle the threads of that particular skein. What is amusing to me is that I can often tell that the original correspondent is a well-educated British person with a slight typing problem...