Saturday 7 July 2012

Very Foward Looking

On the bus from the car hire place to Luton airport:

Not Very Attractive

In an article in the Telegraph about how it has been suggested that women over a certain age should not wear bikinis, the writer claims that she ought to have "brindled" with indignation at this proposition:
It conjures up an interesting image, but I suspect "bristled" may have been the word she was looking for.

A Bunde and Coke Thanks

The Australian Financial Review is fairly expensive. It is supposed to know about financial things (the clue is in the name). Given these facts, it should not repeatedly refer to Germany's central bank as the Bundebank:




Spoctrate

Dear Spectator
You were once a fine magazine; you are now a fine magazine in need of a copy editor. If you don't believe me, just look at these errors, picked at random from your 30 June 2012 issue:

1. "become" is incorrect:

 2. Using "an homage" rather than "a homage" suggests that you are prescribing the horrid new pronunciation that lengthens and emphasises the final syllable of the word "homage". Someone once said that the further towards the end of any word a society chooses to place the stress, the greater that society's decadence:
 3. Toby Young rather undermines his argument for the kind of education he received by displaying in the phrase "these proposal" his inability to distinguish plural from singular:
 4. What are "back accounts" and what does "gave own his own" mean:
 5: "more nourishing than", surely - plus grammatically "the reason she preferred it is so she could spend more time" is wrong; it should be "the reason she preferred it is that it allowed her to spend more time":
 6. Surely "when you've seen as much and lived as long as Dorothy has" would be the correct way to express what the writer is trying to say:
 7. "neigbours" - do you not even have spellcheck:
Possibly you are well aware of all these problems and merely unable to find someone suitably qualified to do the job. If so, let me know. I'd happily take it on (depending on the salary, of course).

Shame

I used to be proud of my arts degree from the ANU:



The Dreaded Plauge