I’ve been back in the UK for the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School; hence the lack of updates here.
Early in the week there was a conversation over breakfast about “txt-speke” and emoticons. Personally, I loathe emoticons, Continue reading “international language?”
Category: headlines
lying swine
Well, no, of course, it isn’t the pigs themselves who are lying, and I should probably feel guilty about adding to their bad press, but pigs have had plenty of air-time already on this blog and at least this time the post is about humans dying, not – at least not directly – about pigs being slaughtered.
Looking around the web, swine ‘flu is causing all sorts of reactions, from panic, to ridicule. It’s clearly thought to be important by many, as this screen shot from the BBC site indicates:
Continue reading “lying swine”
the good news or the bad news?
More quibbling of headlines, this time in English news. Today, the BBC website leads with WHO raises pandemic alert level.
Which is all very well, but I glimpsed just the headline on another site and had to go and read the story to clarify if this meant more doom and gloom, or if it meant that things were getting better.
After all, if you advertise a product that “raises spirits”, it would do exactly the same as a product that “lifts spirits”. But “raising the alert level” is pretty much the opposite of “lifting the alert”.
Continue reading “the good news or the bad news?”
headline news
This paradoxical headline comes from today’s ¡Qué!, one of Madrid’s free newspapers:
Twenty-four-hour gas stations can’t close at night: if they do, they won’t be 24-hour gas stations.
Who checks the headlines before the papers go to press? Don’t they have sub editors anymore?
Continue reading “headline news”
books to look cool
According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang, new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.
This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
Continue reading “books to look cool”
don't confuse the narrator 