In the UK, I think people talk of the ‘recession’, but here in Spain we’re not mealy-mouthed – no tenemos pelos en la lengua – so it’s a full-blown ‘crisis’.
Despite the world’s financial problems, though, I’ve been fortunate to have a reasonable amount of work, and I’d begun to hope that things were getting better for other people, too. So I was a bit taken aback to receive this in an email from a translation agency this week (my emphasis): Continue reading “situation critical”
I started to write about the results of the Mslexia poetry survey yesterday, but ended up going off at a bit of a tangent.
I’d stumbled across a news item on the Poetry Book Society website which referred to the survey under the eye-catching headline “Mslexia Poetry Phobia Report”, and was immediately distracted (yes, my life is full of tangents and distractions) by the phrase “a condition known as metrophobia”.
Continue reading “the fear of the word”
A news story on the BBC website under the headline “Polar bears have maternal Irish brown bear ancestors” seems to imply some strange evolutionary time shifts:
It reminds of the theory that insanity is hereditary – you get it from your children.
Under the headline “The demon head,” today’s digital edition of the (UK) Metro is running a story about a primary school headteacher banned “after a torrent of racist outbursts.”
The disciplinary panel chairman is reported as saying that the headmaster demonstrated ‘racial and religious prejudice’ and made ‘offensive and derogatory’ comments, and the Metro claims that:
the catalogue of foul-mouthed comments […] included calling a prospective teacher a ‘P*ki’
Reading the ‘newspaper’ on Tuesday – the 20p Independent i – I got the impression that the concept of news must have changed considerably since I used to read the UK press on a regular basis. There was no text other than ‘headlines’ on the front page, and inside it seemed all to be gossip, sport or opinion. Even what I think was intended as an editorial struck me as no more weighty than a teenager’s blog entry.
Last night, I watched the BBC news on television instead. Sadly it was no better.
Continue reading “news and clichés”
don't confuse the narrator 