language & communication – Page 11 – don't confuse the narrator

men at work

The local pub has scaffolding up and their noticeboard invites customers to “bare with us” while external decoration is undertaken.

Sign: Business open as normal. Please bare with us while external decoration is being undertaken

The words stripping, cladding and frieze come to mind.

blowing my own trumpet

Close up of band statue, l'Escala, Spain

This week I received a surprisingly enthusiastic reaction to some poems I had submitted for feedback; I also received some delightful comments on my blog from random robots.

I leave it to the reader to guess which is which:
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news and views

Two snippets from the news have caught my eye this week.

Firstly, I gather from this tweet from the Independent that I must have missed something about new government policies on euthanasia:

Tweet: "pensioners to be told how long they have left to live"

I wonder how much warning they intend to give before carting us off to be processed into Soylent Green.
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I have a difficult few days ahead, working on a translation dealing with geotechnical investigation surveys. The difficulty is not the translation, but the temptations involved: I must not talk of experts in the field using cutting-edge technology to lay the foundations for success.

And I probably shouldn’t complain that the work is boring. (Though it certainly isn’t earth-shatteringly interesting.)

positively logical

It’s not all fun spending a week in a house with a pedant whose current reading matter is the biography of a logical positivist (or that of any other philosopher, perhaps). I was told yesterday that describing someone as “a good poet” was meaningless, it was a value judgment, that what I was actually saying was, “she is a poet; hurrah!” (As opposed to “she is a poet; boo!”)

Guard dogs — No dogs or other animals - clustered or otherwise - were harmed in the writing of this post

We did however manage to see eye to eye – or was that hear ear to ear? – when the news was on the other night, reporting on a disease affecting dogs in the UK recently. The disease remains unidentified, but the reporter said that some progress had been made after vets observed clusters of dogs dying all across the country from the south west to the north east.

It is probably sad but true that in the course of their work vets observe animals dying. But to observe clusters of them dying and not take action – as opposed to noticing the clusters of reported dog deaths – seems heartless. I think any vet who did so would be a bad vet and deserve to be booed.