Category: language & communication

panics and pandemics

Last week I received a writers’ newsletter with yet another warning of a new phishing scam. This scam asks for your bank details so tax owed to you can be paid in directly. One of the recipients responded saying that she didn’t see how people could still be fooled; hadn’t we had enough warnings?

Of course people will continue to be fooled by such things because they want to believe that they are going to get a windfall.

But why people fall for a story like this one about swine ‘flu and zombism, is a bit more complex. It’s a brilliantly done hoax, but there are any number of clues that let a careful reader identify it as just that: a hoax.
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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”.
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headline news

This paradoxical headline comes from today’s ¡Qué!, one of Madrid’s free newspapers:

Headline: 24-hour gas stations to close at night
Paradox or careless phrasing?

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?
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of branches and bunches

Half the people in the village this morning were carrying bunches of flowers and greenery, which reminds me that it must be Domingo de Ramos – Palm Sunday.

Ramo and rama are words I can never get straight. Checking today in the on-line Diccionario de la Real Academia, I see that rama is a branch emerging from the tunk or main stem of a plant. Ramo, on the other hand, is a secondary level branch that emerges from the rama madre, or, perhaps, a rama cortada del árbol. If branches change sex the further they get from the trunk or once they’ve been cut from the tree, no wonder I’m confused.
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inconceivable

I’ve always found typical Spanish names a problem: who’d call their daughter Dolores, for example, given that it means “pains”? Or Sagrario, which, according to your reading, may be “shrine” or “monstrance”. Or Purificación or Inmaculada Concepción?

Of course these are traditional Catholic names which are also reflected in dedications of churches and church schools around the country.
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