My Goldfish And I

An advertising campaign has appeared in which apparently illiterate celebrities begin stories involving their Golfish™ credit card.

Me was going to the pub? Me went for a stroll? What me finds particularly offensive about this is the assumed down-to-earth chumminess, the complicity in a bit of everyday speech that may not be exactly grammatical but who cares, because that's how us all talk when us are not trying to sound posh - when at the same time it claims to celebrate language, because each poster begins a short story and then invites you to visit the website to read the rest. It's a credit card poster campaign that is all about storytelling. Isn't that lovely?

The ‘Me and My Goldfish’ stories explore relationships between people and their Goldfish. No doubt, many of you will have your own stories about your experiences with your Goldfish card. From the mundane to the spectacular, these stories tell us more and more about the relationships we have built with our cardholders over the last 12 years. That’s why we are keen to do all we can to encourage the art of storytelling, and are delighted to associate Goldfish with National Storytelling Week. Look out for a whole range of exciting events taking place in the months to come.

Not all of the celebrities are literate, of course. In Rik Mayall's page he is quoted as saying,

I think it's pompous to call myself a comedian, I prefer to think of myself as a phenomena.

"A phenomena"? The word is of course phenomenon. In any case, shouldn't that be Me thinks it's pompous?

Happy New Year, Y'all

Eddie Awad recently mentioned the Southern US Y'all (or You-all) in a piece about coming to America as an English speaker some years ago and not recognising some of the expressions he heard (You have Egg On Your Chin.)

I like y'all, and the Northern British equivalent, youse (pronounced like booze). Y'all and youse are plural forms of you, like the archaic ye that we don't seem to need any more ("O ye of little faith"; "Ye Gods") and in my experience people are careful to use them only when addressing more than one person. It's nice to see a dialect form that makes a finer distinction than Standard English.

Save money on Hambags

I was pleased to discover today that there is a way to profit from other people's typos. The idea is that misspelled items on eBay attract fewer bids because searches for "Canon Powershot" or "Handbag" don't find "Cannon Powersot", "Hambag" and so on. These items end up selling for less money. As the fatfingers.com website says, "Other people's typos can save you money."

As little as six to eight

My local bathroom showroom tells me that a new bathroom can be in place in "as little as 6-8 weeks". A little Googling produces several pages of similar claims:

The good news is that you can slim down and shape up in as little as four to eight weeks.

A person can be in contact with one of these viruses and come down with the illness in as little as one to three days.

In many cases, recovery time can be as little as one to two weeks.

Frog eggs laid in warm water may develop in as little as one to two days.

Now surely these are rather odd statements. Each one states a minimum time in which something can be achieved, but then in the same breath mentions another time that is slightly longer. If you can slim down and shape up in four weeks, why mention eight?

My feeling is that the writers have confused two things. They want to impress us with a statistic about a surprisingly short time, so they start confidently with as little as. (A new bathroom in just six short weeks? That's amazing!) Then they remember the realistic distribution pattern, and think maybe they should indicate a range, perhaps because they are used to quoting one (delivery times can vary, you know what plumbers can be like, etc). The result doesn't make any sense.

How to spot an e-mail scam, continued

From: Bank of America
To: phantom.nitpicker@xxxzzzz.com
Subject: Last Notice

Verify Your Account Details

 

As part of mesures of ensuring a safer and more secure Banking environment,We have re-structured our Banking servers .

Hence, we have decided to put an extra verification process to ensure your identity and account information is protected.

Please click on continue, to the verification process and ensure your Account information is entered correctly to get verified.

It is all about your security.

Thank you.

World Cup Fever

Twice during today's FIFA World Cup match between Brazil and Croatia, the commentators described star player Ronaldo Nazário de Lima as appearing "disinterested".

"Disinterested" means that he stood to gain or lose nothing from the situation and was therefore impartial and unbiased, which, for an international player representing his country live on TV around the world, seems unlikely. What they probably meant was that he appeared, to them, rather unenthusiastic, and that his attention seemed elsewhere.

Once you look it up, however, you find a more complex history. In the seventeenth century, disinterested used to mean not interested: that is, the same as uninterested. Then it developed its distinct meaning as impartial, which held for two hundred years, only faltering in the early twentieth century as people, perhaps appropriately, decided they weren't really bothered what it meant. Now it still officially means impartial, but it is so widely used in the sense of uninterested that most people probably expect that meaning, which I feel is a shame. A word for without a stake in the outcome and therefore impartial, though not a word you might need every day, is one that might occasionally be useful. Two words for not bothered are surely less useful. If you care about these things, that is.

Á là Google

Perhaps nitpicking French is a new departure for me, but I could not let this pass without comment. As reported in Business Week (my emphasis):

What's next in easy-to-use business intelligence? Gartner has a concept it calls "Biggle" -- the intersection of BI and Google. The idea is that the data warehousing software will be so sophisticated that it understands when different people use different words to describe the same concepts or products. It creates an index of related information -- á là Google -- and dishes relevant results out in response to queries.

Now much as I welcome a new era of Biggling, in which super-advanced Business Intelligence software will interpret the vague mumblings of datawarehouse users and return intelligently structured trend analysis reports in a manner reminiscent of the ship's computer in Star Trek, you cannot just make up accents at random and expect them to give an authentic cosmopolitan feel to a dreary IT analysis report. "A la Google," the writer must have thought, "not bad, but it could do with a bit more Frenchifying. Hmm, 'Â lã Gøögle' I wonder? No, too Swedish..."

Perhaps an analysis company that can't even bother to research or proofread an everyday phrase like À la... does not deserve to be taken seriously.

The abysmal failure of the US (and increasingly whole Western) educational system

Here is Fabian Pascal in fine grumpy form as usual, berating the IT industry for its inability to think straight:

As I keep saying: the abysmal failure of the US (and increasingly whole Western) educational system is not only that it produces arrogant ignorance, but also inability to reason.

While we're bemoaning the state of Western education, perhaps it's worth pointing out that the sentence doesn't quite make sense.

Notice that it mentions two particular aspects of the US (and increasingly whole Western) educational system, in the form "not only x, but also y". In other words, one failure of the system is that "it produces arrogant ignorance". Another failure of the system is "inability to reason". However, he probably didn't mean that the system has an inability to reason. What he probably meant was that it produced an inability to reason, or to construct coherent sentences while bemoaning the state of Western education. In other words,

As I keep saying: the abysmal failure of the US (and increasingly whole Western) educational system is that it produces not only arrogant ignorance, but also inability to reason.

How to spot an e-mail scam

I recently received the following e-mail message:

Dear Valued HSBC Customer

We believe that, as in everything else, you deserve the best in banking too. Therefore protective measures is been applied to satisfy our striving customer needs. Our technical service department is currently upgrading our SSL servers to enhance adequate banking security,to give our customers a better, fast and secure online banking service this YEAR 2006. Due to the recent update of the servers, you are kindly requested to please confirm your banking details by following the link below. .

https://Securityalert.HSBC.co.uk/1/2/

HSBC Bank Plc
Security Advisor
HSBC Bank PLC.

Dear Valued HSBC Customer doesn't quite ring true, and even if the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation wanted to use such a cheesy greeting, they surely wouldn't capitalize valued and customer.

The word too is redundant, in as in everything else, the best in banking too.

Protective measures is been applied speaks for itself, but striving customer needs doesn't make sense, and neither does to enhance adequate banking security, which is also missing a space after its comma.

A better, fast and secure online banking service is just confusing, as is this YEAR 2006.

Nobody says you are kindly requested.

There are two full stops after by following the link below.

The signature says HSBC Bank PLC twice, but with two different capitalizations for PLC. The first one appears to be intended as the name of the sender.

If you are going to set up a scam in which you pretend to be a prestigious international bank, in English, my advice is to have an English speaker read the message back before pressing "send".

Espresso, Embiggened

I am grateful to a Mr Allan Mothersill for a number of insights regarding the Dualit 84009 Chrome Espresso Coffee Maker, which he generously reviewed on Amazon UK.

He writes:

Im mostly a drinker off tea, but one off my mates tempted me to buy this, tellign me that it would make me look at coffee in a diferent light.

Consequentely I bort it and how glad I am! Get yorself some desent beans from the super market and prepared with this mashine, you will find coffee that tasts as good as Starr Bucks. Iff you think thats being genrous, it just shows how impressed i am with this mashine. It has certainly embiggened my appreshiation off the brown bean!

Why not 5 stars? Well its not as quick as instant unles you use the capsules though it tastes so much better so if your in a rush you have to fall back on instant.

I notice that he is not a lazy speller, as his spellings of of, if, consequently, supermarket, Starbucks and appreciation are all longer than the conventional versions, although his apostrophe key does appear to be broken.

The word embiggened (which he spells perfectly) is from The Simpsons, where the Springfield town motto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man". Thanks to Mr Mothersill, I came across the Wikipedia entry on Simpsons neologisms, which includes such indispensible terms as Debigulator, Financial Panther and Karmaceuticals.

I do think he might have rather missed the point of the rating system though, by deducting a star when using the Dualit 84009 Chrome Espresso Coffee Maker turned out to be slower than making instant coffee.

"Oftentimes", indeed

The word "sometimes" has been around for a long time and is self-explanatory. It refers to something that happens on some occasions. "Some" is more than a few, and less than a lot. A moderate, smallish, reasonable number of times, then. Now imagine you want to refer to something that happens a bit more frequently than that. Often, perhaps. So you take the word "sometimes", rip out the "some" and replace it with "often" and get "oftentimes", even though "often" already means the same thing, and the combined word doesn't even make sense. Shouldn't it at least be "manytimes"? Depressingly, it seems the word appears in around 100 blogs per day, according to Technorati:

Thickies and Fatties

The computing term "Thin Client" arose during the 1990s, when it referred to a mythical "network computer" that had no disk drive, to be used in a configuration where the bulk of the processing took place on the server. The idea was that we would all have cheap, slinky "net computers" that accessed online services, while we rode hoverbikes and spent weekends on the Moon. In practice few were built and none were sold, probably because they seemed to cost about as much as regular computers, networks were slow and unreliable, there were no office applications available and people liked having their own stuff.

Later, with the growth of the Web, a new "thin client" model arose, and nowadays the term has come to mean an application that you use through your web browser.

The opposite of a thin client is the configuration where a big old application has to be installed on each machine, and this naturally became known as a "fat client".

The problem is that in management circles, you can't say the word "Fat". "Downsizing", certainly. "Leveraging", of course. "De-scoping", "White Box", "Blue Sky" and "Results-driven goal-oriented win-win synergies", no problem, but you can't stand up at the weekly Heads Of Department meeting and say "Fat", and so we started to hear the term "thick client". Well, it's the opposite of thin, right?

Well, no. The entire point of "thin client" is that it's slimmed down, not anything to do with its depth. It's skinny. It's light. It's lo-cal. It's slender, svelte, lean, trim and nimble. It has not, in short, eaten all the pies. The opposite of that is not "thick". In any case, as a good friend (who it must be said, likes her pies) remarked, what about people who are a bit thick? How must they feel?

The configuration in which a big old application has to be installed on each machine is called "fat client". Get used to it. Or, if human life is directly at risk, "rich client". Or if you must, "smart client". But let's leave those thickies out of it.

One list or two?

In Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef, Joel Spolsky writes:

Why is it that the cool upstart consulting companies start out with a string of spectacular successes, meteoric growth, and rapidly degenerate into mediocrity?

This is a rather old article, but I came across it recently while reading his excellent book, "Joel on Software" (Apress, ISBN 1590593898), and it's an example of something I keep seeing.

At first glance, it's a straightforward list. The cool upstart consulting companies start out with x, y, and z.

Or do they? Actually, they only start out with x and y. Then, later on, they do z. Therefore it should be

Why is it that the cool upstart consulting companies start out with a string of spectacular successes and meteoric growth, and rapidly degenerate into mediocrity?

Like you do

Tom Kyte makes an excellent point about writing in clear, plain, conversational English - but then spoils it for me by summing it up as "write like you talk".

Like should be used for comparing things, not actions. Technically speaking, it is a preposition like with or from, not a conjunction like as or because.

Or is it?

For one thing, what should the corrected version be? "Write as you talk" would be ambiguous, because it might mean "write while you talk". "Write the way you talk" is better, but I have to admit that it is longer and loses some of its immediacy. And nobody would want to correct The Smiths' "I am human and I need to be loved, just like anybody else does", let alone Elvis when he sings "I guess I'll never know the reason why you love me like you do." Hell, when you're the King, you can mix prepositions and conjunctions whenever you damn well please.

Of course, song lyrics have their own rules, and we have to grant some poetic license. Toots and the Maytalls' "Reggae Has Got Soul" just wouldn't be the same. But does that mean we should allow the advertisers of Dove shower gel to claim that it won't dry your skin like soap can?

Dictionary.com's definition includes this:

Usage Note: Writers since Chaucer's time have used like as a conjunction, but 19th-century and 20th-century critics have been so vehement in their condemnations of this usage that a writer who uses the construction in formal style risks being accused of illiteracy or worse.

I also can't help thinking that the French language does not seem to be weakened greatly by having to make do with the same word in Écrire comme on parle and Voler comme un oiseau. Italian is the same.

In the end, my advice is to write the way you talk.

Within reason.

Unless you're Elvis.

Half Baked Muffin

In Starbucks this morning for my weapons-grade cappuccino, I had to read the menu item a couple of times. The Caffè Misto was described as:

Half brewed coffee, half steamed milk.

The very fact that I had to read it two or three times while wondering who on Earth would want their coffee half-brewed and their milk not quite steamed suggested that perhaps the language should have been clearer.

But then, thinking about it on my way back, I had to admit that the ubiquitous coffee corporation is grammatically correct. I had been reading it as half-brewed coffee, half-steamed milk. Years of reading about hassle free motoring and low start mortgages had actually got me mentally hyphenating, and here, today, was the reason why that is a bad thing.

In the news this week

The reputation of British footballer David Beckham sank to a new low when it was reported (by a former nanny, who had previously signed a confidentiality agreement not to reveal details of her employers' private lives, but who nonetheless sold for £300,000 what she claimed to have seen on a cellphone they lent to her) that he had sent a text message to a woman who was not his wife that included the words "I really wish we was in your bed now."

What was he thinking? Is nothing sacred? What is so hard about "I really wish we were in your bed now"?

Has someone in the Beckham family at some point sat down to simplify the language, like Noah Webster, and decided that the whole "was"/"were" thing is just too complicated, and to hell with subjunctives while we're at it? They would probably go on to argue that this not only represents a welcome rationalization, but also saves a letter in text messages. My heart goes out to poor Victoria.

My Husband and I, continued

Some eight hours into the visually ravishing yet in all other respects pointless waste of time that is "Hero", the character Broken Sword says to Nameless Warrior, "You are asking Snow and I to trust you."

Now that has to be the final straw, as a dear friend once remarked, on the cake. It is not enough that we are forced to endure long futile fight scenes, in which people fly around irritatingly and to no good purpose, sometimes for several hours at a time, whilst exchanging serene faraway looks through slow-motion raindrops, perhaps not a practical combat technique in a real-world self-defense scenario, or that there is no coherent plot and at least one of the characters appears to die two or three times, or that the same serene faraway expression and monotone delivery is employed by all of the characters all of the time. By this point in the film you may have lost the will to live and all feeling in your legs but at least, you are thinking to yourself, it is not sloppy. Say what you like about the non-characters, their vaguely defined mission and relationships and their serene faraway looks, but at least you can admire their dedication, their discipline, their long years of studying calligraphy and swordsmanship, and their dress sense. Until, that is, BS blows the whole thing by blurting out "You are asking Snow and I to trust you." "I", "Me", it's all the same fing innit?

How to put brackets around words

Now this, you would think, would not be a difficult subject. The day they explained brackets at school, surely, was a day you could pretty much coast. What you do (they might have patiently explained) is this:

(put some words inside the brackets)

A simple enough rule, then. Almost as simple as how to spell "its". But can we all get it right? No. Can we cock it up? Oh yes.

( some words and some intriguing additional space inside the brackets )

Now what the hell's with that?

One practical problem is that if you leave redundant and unexpected spaces after the opening or before the closing bracket, HTML will feel free to break the line on the space, unless you use the non-breaking space character  . Microsoft Word will do the same, unless you use the equivalent Ctrl-Shift-space sequence. But do redundant bracket spacers bother with these niceties? They do not. Do their documents look a bit crap? I think we know the answer.

The IT colon

From time to time, information needs to be displayed in columns. This is all well and good and we can of course appreciate the many benefits this elegant convention has brought to humanity throughout recorded history.

But what in Hell's name is going on with the colons in the following example (it's made up, but a familiar layout):

Account           : 4321
Name              : Smith
Job               : Agent
Date              : 2005-01-01

In general there should be no spaces before punctuation marks - so what are the colons doing all the way over there?

If they were doing their normal job of introducing a following item, the listing would look like this:

Account:            4321
Name:               Smith
Job:                Agent
Date:               2005-01-01

At first you might think they are there to help the reader match items horizontally by providing a visual reference part way between the columns. But then, all that this column of colons actually achieves is to move the right hand column further away, as well as adding a distracting vertical line. You could achieve exactly the same thing by simply moving the columns closer together:

Account           4321
Name              Smith
Job               Agent
Date              2005-01-01

Or perhaps we wanted a vertical bar? Well then, use the 'pipe' character:

Account           | 4321
Name              | Smith
Job               | Agent
Date              | 2005-01-01

That is fairly pointless without going the whole hog and making it into a table, like this:

+-------------------+--------------------+
| Account           | 4321               |
| Name              | Smith              |
| Job               | Agent              |
| Date              | 2005-01-01         |
+-------------------+--------------------+

- which is itself a bit pointless when simply aligning the text into columns would have done the trick perfectly well in the first place.

So IT guys, we love you, but can you just stop doing the thing with the damn colons?

i.e.g.

I could rant about enormity (not the same thing as enormousness), which has been used a lot by reporters in the wake of the recent devastating, horrific, but not, strictly speaking, evil tsunami; or perhaps disinterested (not the same thing as uninterested), humorous (not the same as funny), or even momentarily (not the same thing as in a moment): but there are shorter, simpler expressions that get mangled all the time, and the fact that there are so many opportunities to get them wrong, when they are so easy to get right, leads to massively more irritation for a nitpicker who is having a bad day.

i.e. stands for id est, which is Latin for that is. It is used to suggest an alternative name or definition.

e.g. stands for exempli gratia, which by a rather less straightforward translation means for example. (Exempli is self-explanatory enough, but gratia means by/with/from a favor, and is sometimes translated as for the sake of.)

They are not the same thing.

If you refer to, for example, menswear (i.e. socks), you are saying, wrongly, that menswear means socks; that is, the Menswear Department is really the Sock Department. Which it isn't.