I am a full time protector of the English language as you know and I have just scored 10 out of 12 in an online quiz being hosted by The Economist newspaper: why not try it yourself? Here's the link: http://www.economist.com/diversions/quiz.cfm?quizname=stylequiz
DW
I took a walk into town today and as I set off, on foot, I spotted a young chap from the house almost opposite. I have not been introduced to the man so we don't know each other. It takes around 20 minutes to walk into town and after about 5 minutes he started looking over his shoulder at me and suddenly speeded up. I thought, this Eastern European looking chap thinks I'm the secret police so I'll play along and I speeded up too. He then put on a fair burst.
He rounded a corner and by the time I got there he had put around 30 metres between us. I kept up and crossed over to the other side of the street where I think he lost sight of me: lots of trees! He then slowed right down and I think he was shocked to see me out of the corner of his eye level with him. However, I carried on at the pace I'd got up to and arrived before him at the road crossing. As I started crossing the road I noticed that he had got to the railings around 10 metres from the crossing and was standing stock still, waiting for me to cross the road and make the decision: which of the three possible forward directions would I take?
Since I was really minding my own business I carried on and haven't seen him since.
Bit of a lark that! Wonder what he'll say when he gets back home?
DW
In an advert in last week's Economist newspaper, there is an advert for some educational materials. The materials look interesting and if I were in the mood I would buy them. However, this is what caught my eye:
Please send me ... which consists of 24 half hour lectures ... They then add, '12 hours in all'.
Do you get the impression that Fermat's last theorem, Fibonacci numbers and the Pythagorean theorem and geometry of ellipses might be a bit beyond someone who needs to be told that 24 half hour lectures equates to 12 hours?
DW
Now all of these weak minded people who are hell bent on mashing our language are calling powdered baby milk FORMULA.
It makes me so frustrated to listen to these supposedly educated people on Radio 4 hurtling their way into speaking AmerEnglish. What they fail to realise is that the version of American they are importing is the language of the uneducated American. If they cared to listen to and read work by educated and professional Americans (not journalists, I should stress, since they are as bad as ours) they would see that they do understand prepositions, they do use adverbs and they don't use street slang in the way that our journalists are doing.
Last week one of these clowns even said that a politician should fess up ... for goodness' sake.
DW
A couple of years ago I went to the Isle of Lewis with son Andrew, Sister Susan and her husband Neville.
I took a fair number of photos and a lot of video footage. I spent a lot of time editing part of the video film and saved it all to my hard disk and then onto CD. I gave a copy of the CD to Susan and Andrew and kept one myself.
I needed that CD at the end of last week only to find that my computers said it was BLANK. Oh beggar! Of course, I blamed myself.
Then at Susan's house over the weekend, I borrowed her CD and dropped into the laptop ... hers was blank too. I then took it to her desktop and it worked ... not empty at all. I smartly dumped everything onto my memory stick and then back on to my laptop. I backed it up again as soon as I got home.
Gates? I wouldn't pay him in washers to be perfectly honest.
DW
