parenthetical pedantry

The more I read on-line, the more I think the mathematicians have it right. The meaning of 4+3*6 is perfectly well defined. You have to do the multiplication first.

If you want to force the addition to be be done first, you just slip in some parentheses: (4+3)*6.

Sadly, text isn’t like that. And with the internet encouraging writing by all and sundry, and forcing hurried writing by those who should know better, it’s easy to produce potentially ambiguous statements like this, from a piece about the need to encourage social inclusion by reading, on the London Book Fair site:

Not only are those who read less likely to be divorced, but they are less likely to smoke and be unemployed

My original reading of the first phrase parsed “those who read less” as a unit, and the phrase apparently claimed members of this group were “likely to be divorced”.
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advice from Catalonia

A photo just sent to me from Barcelona:

Switch off and read

In case you can’t guess, it says: “Switch off the telly and read a poem.” Which sounds like a good idea to me.

pedantry

I should probably start this post by saying that I know my grammar and punctuation aren’t perfect. However, I’m not usually writing about politically and emotionally delicate matters; and I’m not writing on an international news site which is read by millions worldwide.

It bothers me when I see phrases like this on the BBC website:

“I absolutely condemn sexual tourism [and] I condemn paedophilia in which I have never in any way participated, and all the people who accuse me of that type of thing should be ashamed,” Mr Mitterrand said.

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national poetry day

Well, in the UK, at least, it’s a national day and there’s plenty about it in all the national newspapers. The Guardian, for example, reports a selection of news and associated snippets.

This year’s theme is “heroes and heroines”. I can’t think of any poems in my files that fit that theme, and I certainly can’t produce one to order. So here’s one which refers to the ex-prime minister – definitely not a hero of mine. The poem was published in the South Bank Poetry Magazine a while back.
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ferreting around on the web

A friend happened to comment that the latest edition of the Radio Times had meerkats on the front cover.

This got me wondering why meerkats hadn’t been “invented” when I was in school – they’re like an internet meme that sprang fully-formed in the public consciousness just a few years ago – and I did a quick bit of on-line research.
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