I missed the story in the Guardian on March 6th about our “growing lifespan”. (I do think ‘growing’ is a strange adjective: surely ‘increasing’ would be better?)
Anyway, I came across the story today after reading the bemusing phrase:
The lifespan of the average British person increases by five hours a day.
on the BBC website.
Reading that made me suddenly feel tired.
Continue reading “not born yesterday”
Occasional unfortunate juxtapositions of headlines or adverts and news stories can’t be avoided, particularly online when there may be no one person in charge of a page design and layout.
Even so, I was shocked to see the front page of today’s UK Metro digital edition.
There’s a huge, attention-grabbing photo of devastation caused by the earthquake in Japan, and right below it an advert for Pokémon Everywhere which claims that “over 150 new pokémon have arrived in the UK”.
Continue reading “tact in advertising”
I understand that there are people who have little grasp of the grammar, syntax and spelling of their own language, but should they really be allowed to work in jobs that require them to write for the public?
Texts published on web pages are often faulty – many are written by badly paid hack writers with a deadline to meet – but it’s fairly simple to go back and correct them.
Slogans and texts for major advertising campaigns, on the other hand, are worked on by teams of professionals and they pass through the hands of many people before being approved. And yet we get things like this:
Continue reading “accuracy in advertising”
Despite being as ready as any of my classmates to chant the rhyme –
Latin is a language as dead as dead can be;
It killed the ancient Romans, and now it’s killing me.
– Latin was actually my favourite school subject and I have long believed it was the most useful subject I studied.
Continue reading ““it killed the ancient romans…””
I know I try and keep away from politics on the blog, but because of the Catalán elections, there have been a couple of Spanish stories in the news this week and they are really too good to ignore. The first, reported by the BBC under the headline Spain outrage over migrant bombing game centres on a video game – Rescate (Rescue) – that the Partido Popular launched a few days on their website.
I haven’t played the game, which seems to be no longer available on the website, but have read a few of the reports in both Spanish and UK national press. The tag line for the game appears to be:
Ayuda a Alicia y a Pepe, su gaviota, a rescatar a Cataluña de la crisis
and it features Alicia Sánchez-Camacho (President of the PP in Catalonia) as Alicia Croft, perched on a great white seagull shooting at illegal immigrants and symbols of Catalán nationalism.
Continue reading “political polemic”
don't confuse the narrator 