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Lack of rigour
Feb. 18th, 2010 11:42 amI was writing something about Kwik Fit the other day, relating to a French private equity fund that bought the company on borrowed money, loaded the company up with debt, and then paid itself back the money with a massive dividend, having to sell Kwik Fit's insurance arm to reduce that newly created mountain of debt. Yes, this is modern capitalism at work.
Kwik Fit. Or is it Kwik-Fit? Or Kwikfit? Well, going to Kwik Fit's home page won't help you, because they spell it all three ways on the home page. This is a long-standing problem with some companies. I remember the days of the old Royal & SunAlliance, which at the time had only recently merged to create that name. For a year or so we would get releases referring to Royal and Sun Alliance, Royal & Sunalliance, and variations thereof. You would think that the branding people would get the precise message across to the PR people, wouldn't you?
In the end I established that it was Royal & SunAlliance by going to their headquarters and photographing the newly installed sign above the door.
Today, of course, the company has decided to impersonate the Republic of South Africa and calls itself RSA. That won't do, so I call it RSA Insurance (or RSA Group Holdings if referring to the holding company rather than the operating unit).
But all of this came to a head in my mind this morning when I realized why I was so annoyed by the way in which A History of The World in 100 Objects is introduced on the Radio. First of all, the title of the programme doesn't come in for about 90 seconds to two minutes (cue elvish-like music in the background and a portentous female voice), but then she gets the title wrong.
Or does she? What she says is
Yet when you look at the title on the page, or on the web, it's "A History Of The World In 100 Objects."
By my way of thinking, that is spoken as "A History Of The World In One Hundred Objects". If you want it spoken the other way, you have to write "A History Of The World In A Hundred Objects". So, either the web page and the Radio Times, or the speaker, is wrong.
This may appear pedantic, but it isn't really. Our use of iconic representations for numbers is an oddity of the Roman alphabet, stealing a non-phonetic pictogramic alphabetical system from the non-Roman world. But its use, because of this very peculiarity, gives of strict rules (because of the lack of phoneticism). "200" is pronounced "Two hundred". You can't interpret it (phonetically) as "a couple of hundred", or "Ten score". Because of these rules, I know that when I see the title "24", that it is not a TV series called "Two Dozen".
The interpolation of number oconivs in words has become irritatingly popular (e.g. "Se7en"), but it's a convention you can come to live with. But the misreading of actual numbers is a more worrying development, because it creates an unnecessary ambiguity surrounding pictograms that were previously unambiguous.
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Kwik Fit. Or is it Kwik-Fit? Or Kwikfit? Well, going to Kwik Fit's home page won't help you, because they spell it all three ways on the home page. This is a long-standing problem with some companies. I remember the days of the old Royal & SunAlliance, which at the time had only recently merged to create that name. For a year or so we would get releases referring to Royal and Sun Alliance, Royal & Sunalliance, and variations thereof. You would think that the branding people would get the precise message across to the PR people, wouldn't you?
In the end I established that it was Royal & SunAlliance by going to their headquarters and photographing the newly installed sign above the door.
Today, of course, the company has decided to impersonate the Republic of South Africa and calls itself RSA. That won't do, so I call it RSA Insurance (or RSA Group Holdings if referring to the holding company rather than the operating unit).
But all of this came to a head in my mind this morning when I realized why I was so annoyed by the way in which A History of The World in 100 Objects is introduced on the Radio. First of all, the title of the programme doesn't come in for about 90 seconds to two minutes (cue elvish-like music in the background and a portentous female voice), but then she gets the title wrong.
Or does she? What she says is
"A History of the World .... .... .... .... in A hundred Objects".
Yet when you look at the title on the page, or on the web, it's "A History Of The World In 100 Objects."
By my way of thinking, that is spoken as "A History Of The World In One Hundred Objects". If you want it spoken the other way, you have to write "A History Of The World In A Hundred Objects". So, either the web page and the Radio Times, or the speaker, is wrong.
This may appear pedantic, but it isn't really. Our use of iconic representations for numbers is an oddity of the Roman alphabet, stealing a non-phonetic pictogramic alphabetical system from the non-Roman world. But its use, because of this very peculiarity, gives of strict rules (because of the lack of phoneticism). "200" is pronounced "Two hundred". You can't interpret it (phonetically) as "a couple of hundred", or "Ten score". Because of these rules, I know that when I see the title "24", that it is not a TV series called "Two Dozen".
The interpolation of number oconivs in words has become irritatingly popular (e.g. "Se7en"), but it's a convention you can come to live with. But the misreading of actual numbers is a more worrying development, because it creates an unnecessary ambiguity surrounding pictograms that were previously unambiguous.
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