The following item was posted by Paul Crabb on SfEPLine, the e-mail discussion group of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.
“A recent Freecycle announcement:
‘Does anyone have a small fridge in working order. This is to fit under a
worktop. My friend runs a local village bowels club and they need a fridge.’
I bet they do, especially in this heat!”
Christine Lindop, who is a fellow member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, recently bought a new office chair and was somewhat bemused by the instructions that came with it. The User’s Manual had some wonderful pronouncements such as:
“Headrest height: It is the most suitable height that the scruff is fully supported by the headrest.”
“Arm-pad angle adjustment: It’s the available method to lighten the harm to the hand, that one puts the elbow on the armrest naturally according to the working need, and avoid working without elbow support.”
And best of all:
“Seat depth adjustment: It’s the best depth when the haunch is full on the seat, the waist is crutched completely and the inturn of the knee can not touch the seat brim.”
As Christine commented: “And to think all these years I’ve been sitting with a partly crutched waist…”
My friend Briar Singleton has recently shared with me the following symptoms of Swine Flu:
Look out for any unusual blemishes or rashers.
Unusual behaviour: Doing things you would normally find a complete boar.
Bad temper: Things start to easily rind you up.
High temperature: Feeling that you are absolutely bacon hot.
Chills: Feeling like you need to hog the duvet or curl up in front of a crackling fire.
Developing a sty in either or both eyes.
Urgent cravings: For a large glass of swine or stuffing yourself on apples.
Wanting to fight: Shouting things like “Gammon, have a go if you think you’re hard enough”.
Having trouble with the truth: You’re always telling porky pies.
If any of these symptoms show, then immediately call a hambulance, and go to the hogspital for treatment. Smokers please note it is a non-smoking facility, so you won’t be able to have a snout. If it’s a false alarm, you can trotter off home, but if the symptoms return, you may need to go to your local farmacy for some oinkment.
Another treatment for Swine Flu: Spend the night in a smoky room and in the morning you will be cured.
FIFA has banned Mexican Waves at soccer matches to prevent the spread of infection.
With all the information we are receiving about Swine Flu from the media and the government, there is no danger of us being pig-ignorant about it!
My previous post was about my nephew’s rock band. They don’t play Country and Western music, so I’m sure they wouldn’t touch any of these classics, which are listed on the Freeman Institute website:
British readers will fully appreciate the irony of this recruitment poster seen at the Tiverton branch of HBOS on Sunday afternoon.
I would like to thank Sue Edwards, a fellow proofreader, for drawing my attention to this wonderfully funny video about how important proofreading can be. Watch and enjoy!
As a writer, I have a passion for words. I also enjoy networking. So, imagine for a moment that your favourite business networking organization (mine is The Business League) was run by management consultants, and that you all talked in management speak.
Instead of a business breakfast meeting you would have an “early morning enterprise-synergy bacon-and-egg scenario”. And the main advantage of having just one member per profession in each chapter or branch would be that “we marginalize our sector rivals to a point where they are almost nil as a potentially competitive market factor, which means that we can dominate, in a total way, all the marbles”.
Instead of finding ways of passing referrals and doing business with your fellow members you would “innovate front-end methodologies to empower inter-commercial deliverables and thereby maximize your mission-critical schema”.
However, if you are faced with this sort of mumbo-jumbo in your company literature, perhaps you ought to be employing an editor (like me!) to make sense of it all.
I’m sure that you’ve all got your favourite examples of management speak or business buzzwords. Perhaps you could share them with me and we could all have a good laugh! Just send me a comment listing them and I’ll collate all the ones that I receive. I look forward to reading your contributions in due course.
Last Friday I took part in a game of ‘Call My Bluff’. For those readers who don’t know the rules, the object of the game is to guess the correct definition of an obscure word from the three or four different ones given to you by another team.
Although I work with words professionally on a daily basis, I was surprised to find that even I’d never heard of any of the words used in the game. Mind you, the English language is renowned for the richness of its vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 600,000 different words and their definitions, and technical or scientific terms can add millions more to the total. Altogether, there are about 200,000 English words in common use whereas an average well-read educated person can have a total vocabulary of between 15,000 to 20,000 words, and only use about 1,500 of them in a normal week. So it is not surprising that such words as ‘laroid’, ‘lagan’ or ‘xebec’ are totally unknown to most people.
What is particularly interesting is that, despite being rather complex to learn and difficult to master, English is probably the most widely spoken language in the world. Approximately 375 million people speak it as a first language and up to 1,400 million more speak it as a second language. English is the dominant international language in aviation, business, communications, diplomacy, entertainment and science and is an official language in 53 different countries. And what is even more interesting is that each of these countries has its own version of English. We all know about the differences between American (US) English and British English, but what about Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian English, Caribbean English and South African English – all of which merit having their own specialized dictionary being published by the Oxford University Press. And then there is Indian English (the bain of all those British people who hate being put through to certain telephone call centres!), Malaysian English and Chinese English. Professor David Crystal, who specializes in linguistics, has claimed that if you combine native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in the world. India is closely followed in this respect by the People’s Republic of China.
Coming closer to home, there is Scottish English, Welsh English and Irish English. Each region of England itself has its own dialect and even the Isle of Man and Guernsey have their own form of the language. So, you could say that there is no officially correct form of English – not even the ‘Queen’s English’ (after all, her family originally came from Germany and her husband is Greek!) – but this is probably the reason for its beauty, its flexibility and its attraction. Long may it continue!
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