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”
I’ve not been getting much in the way of junk comments on the blog recently, but I still occasionally remember to check and make sure the system hasn’t thrown anything away by mistake. Sadly, all these encouraging remarks were correctly identified as spam:
I also check and see what search terms have led people to the blog.
Continue reading “feedback”
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.
A while back I commented on an engraving at Nottingham castle as it didn’t make sense to me to create a work of art using a nonsensical text.
I compared it to the phrases embedded in the streets of Chepstow, which I’ve always rather liked; these seem to make grammatical sense, and are mostly associated with the commerce and history of the town.
Continue reading “written in stone”
Still with telephones – or, more accurately, still in search of phone and internet connections while travelling – I happened upon this:
In the same way that BT is ‘affectionately’ known as British Telecon, the Spanish company Telefónica is frequently called Timofónica. Perhaps this mission statement from their website explains it: instead of spending money on customer service, it’s going towards ‘creating values for [their] costumers’.
Perhaps someone should tell them that dressing it up nicely won’t help if the basic service is a pig’s ear.
don't confuse the narrator 