language use & abuse – Page 3 – don't confuse the narrator

snail mail

This morning I went to the local post office to send a book to a friend. There are two separate counters, one for general goods, and one for official post office purchases, so, since I had to buy a padded envelope, I had to get receipts from both tills. The envelope cost me 70p.

Years ago, I worked in a school where the secretary kept a box with pens, glue, scissors etc; it was labelled stationary box because it was not to be moved from her desk under any circumstances. My father had taught me that stationery was what was sold by the stationer (the -er- matches) so I understood the joke.

Today when I got home, I checked the till receipt. Now I am wondering whether the parcel will ever arrive; I think I bought an envelope that is going nowhere:

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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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.

iberianismos

As I understand it, air traffic control operations are conducted either in English or in the local language, making good English a required skill for international pilots. It always worries me, then, when a pilot’s accent is so strong that his announcements are incomprehensible.
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it’s unique

A couple of days ago, I travelled on an Iberia flight for the first time in years. It was a little more up-market than the discount airlines I’ve flown with recently and even in tourist class those who bought snacks from the trolley were provided with individual place mats for the fold-down tables.

When I declined to give mine up as rubbish, I suppose the steward thought I wanted a souvenir. In fact I wanted to add it to my collection of bad advertising and extraneous apostrophes.