Tag: plain english

sole-destroying

I hate it when previously comfortable shoes get rough on the inside and start to rub blisters. But if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post, so I guess there’s a silver lining. Or perhaps a latex or leather one.

insoles package label. Spanish / English
Before I went on my last trip I bought insoles at the local todo a cien**. How could I resist a product described as:

ventilative, bibulous and can avoid foot stink and ache.

Personally, I much prefer “ventilative” to the more common “breathable”. After all, air is breathable, which is quite a different quality to that of the materials insoles are made of.
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thank you for your feedback

Those who blog with WordPress will be used to the fact that each time you add a new post you get a post-published feedback page telling you how many posts you’ve made, how many words the latest one has, as well as suggesting tags, offering possible topics for the next post etc.

My previous post was greeted with this:

Wordpress post published feedback: "This is your 494th post. Bomb!"

I know it wasn’t the most inspired of the posts I’ve ever made, but I didn’t think it was so dreadful it deserved to be greeted with a bomb.
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from this week’s news

A couple of things that have caught my eye on the BBC website this week.

First, from the ‘most popular’ links, comes this:

Study links parenting to drinking

Sadly, it doesn’t mean that having children can drive you to drink, which is what I imagined. It actually linked through to a story with the headline “Parenting style strongly affects drinking, Demos says”.

The second is from a story about UK social surveys and comes under the headline Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock.
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the value of good writing

There’s a story up on the BBC website at the moment that quotes Charles Duncombe, “an online entrepreneur”, as saying that a single spelling mistake on a website can cut online sales in half. (For Spanish readers of the blog, there’s a Spanish version of the article available on “BBC Mundo”.)

Duncombe is apparently “shocked” at the poor quality of written English of staff recruited by his companies.

Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.

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dressing it up

Still with telephones – or, more accurately, still in search of phone and internet connections while travelling – I happened upon this:

About Telefónica: We open new pathways in order to continue transforming possibilities into reality, with the objective of creating values for our costumers, employees, society, shareholders, and partners globally.

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.