I nearly crashed my car the other afternoon.
I was driving home from the West Country and listening to radio 2. The music stopped and a pleasant, female voice chimed out one of the many commercials that litter the BBC's airwaves these days.
I can't remember precisely what programme or presenter the commercial was plugging. I tend to tune out when these things are broadcast. But, I do remember that I almost swerved off the road when she added the strap line "..... the sound to your Sunday morning".
The sound TO your Sunday morning.
What the hell sort of language is that? Who wrote it? More to the point, who, charged with the job of editing it, allowed such meaningless drivel to be broadcast?
I wanted to call the Beeb - as I frequently do - to complain. I wanted to take the announcer - or preferably the writer/editor - gently by the throat and explain that there is no such construction in the English language as "the sound to". Unfortunately, I was driving, I was in a hurry and, truthfully, too apathetic to pull off the road and make the call on my mobile.
So, I let it go. And it has rankled ever since.
But really, how could anyone with English as a first language feel comfortable with such a construction. Imagine writing a diary entry that began: The day was fine and filled with the sound to the birds singing. UURGGH.
Why are people not only being allowed to mangle our language on a daily basis but, what's worse, being paid to do so? Is it out of some mis-guided sense of trendyness? Does it denote lack of interest or affection for the language?Or are they simply ignorant ? Whatever the reason, its effect is grating in the extreme.
It was probably around three or four years ago that I first noticed this trend. Like many linguistic horrors it seems to have originated in America.
The carrier of this particular virus was an ad for a shampoo or hair treatment which promised to provide " the secret TO glossy hair" or something equally specious. It made me grind my teeth then and, just writing it, makes me grind them even now. In any event, such is the power of the broadcast word, whether on TV, radio or the WWW, that "the secret TO" rapidly established itself. It infests evry form of the written word but seems to be particularly prevalent in women's magazines, which regularly promise to reveal the secret to bikini figures, workplace romances, perfect teeth, summer diets and buiness success. The people who write and edit these sections are only outdone in their air-headeness by the people who actually choose to read them.
Another hair-tearing construction that pops up all the time is Bored OF or Fed-Up OF. In fact, it's been around so long that, nowadays, when people find things or other people tedious they are just as likely to anoounce that they are Bored Of them as the rest of us are to be bored with them.
But, these prepositional aberrances pale in comparison with the modern insistence on inserting the letter aitch into the word aitch so that it ends up being pronounced as Haitch.
My bank is called HSBC. Or at least, that is how I have always thought of it. Not any more, though, if a young man that I talked to the other day is to be believed. No, according to him, the correct title of my bank is Haitch SBC with a very breathy emphasis on the H inserted at the beginning of the word.
I tried - and dismally failed - to explain to him that the company's name was HSBC with no aitch sound at the beginning. What I actually said was " There is no aitch in the aitch of HSBC". The surreal nature of that opening never really dissipated. The debate that followed progressed rapidly downhill. We might justt as well have been discussing some obscure grammatical construction in Serbo Croat for all the effect my argument had. Suffice to say that the young lad went away convinced that I was either some kind of nutter or that I was the unfortunate victim of a distinctly sub-standard education. For my part, I had to retire to a darkened room and rub myself down gently with a copy of Usage and Abusage.
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Democracy - or what?
The problem with democracy is that it's so bloody unpredictable. Give people the right to vote for whomsoever they fancy and, blow me down if that's not just precisely what the buggers will go and do.
Apart from being found wallowing up to their armpits in the exes trough, nothing exercises our Westminster political reperesentatives more than the idea of people wasting their votes on fringe candidates who refuse to behave like proper politicians: People who spend their own time and money getting their names on the ballot paper in order to pursue a cause or make a difference.
It's enough to get Politics a bad name.
That's why, in the wake of the Local and European elections we have had people like Harridan Harperson sliding in and out of radio and TV studios and claiming that the electorate had used the ballot box to deliver a sharp, wake up call to Labour and the other mainstream parties.
Let's get something straight. The main message the electorate sent Labour was that they didn't like its leader, its policies and, most of all, its arrogant disregard for the concerns of ordinary people. The expenses scandal was just the latest - and most blatant - manifestation of that arrogance. So what has been the party's response to this outpouring of dislike? An exhibition of collective guilt perhaps? A ceremonial donning of sack cloth and ashes? Even an admission that their policies might have, just possibly, been ill-conceived and ineptly executed?
Many things have occurred but none of them remotely like any of the above. A series of nonentities, nobodies and mediocrities has rapidly abandoned ship, each closely accompanied by a painfully thin list of their own accomplishments cunningly disguised as a letter of resignation. These missives contain many references to ME and The PARTY. What they signally fail to contain is any mention of country.
Gordon is still getting on with the job of running the country and saving the world yet still makes time to mutter about the need for Constitutional reform. The same old arguments about the superiority of Proportional Representation have surfaced, encouraged by ministers who hope that therein lies a magic formula for survival. (Strange how every administration that gets hammered at the ballot box touts PR as the most democratic voting system - until results improve or they get re-elected, when they suddenly decide that nothing can beat the dear old first past the post system after all. )
The main purpose of this activity is to distract the electorate from the real issues. What our political elites have chosen - and are still choosing - to ignore is the very simple message that we also don't like Europe. We are fed up with having 80% of our laws dictated to us from a bunker somewhere in Brussels. We are not convinced that allowing Spanish ships to hoover all the fish out of our territorial waters is a good idea; or that European judges from such noted democracies as Albania and Romania should be the final arbiters in our Justice system. Even now, most of us struggle with the proposition that decisions taken in Brussels that outweigh Laws made in Westminster really represent the apogee of democratic governance.
This is where your average politician of whatever stripe puts his or her fingers in their ears and makes nannannnanna sounds. Because, it's not what they want to hear.
Europe is good.
Outside the EU we would be just a small island with no influence and no voice in the world. (That's always been one of my favourites; as if, somehow, being part of Europe changed our geographical location and, once we leave, we'll be towed back into a little backwater where no one will ever take any notice of us again.)
If we leave Europe, major companies like Volkswagen, Renault, BMW and their ilk, will no longer want to do business with us. That's right, on the orders of Frau Merkel or Monsieur Zarkosy, their CEOs will close their UK operations and simply ignore a market where new car sales run at 2 million a year, . It would certainly be fun listening to them explaining that decision at their respective AGMs.
The simple fact of the matter is, politicians like the EU because it's like the UK - only much, much bigger. Hence, there is more money sloshing around; the decisions affect vastly more people and the ministers and apparatchiks making them acquire even more power. The fact that the whole bangshoot is riddled with incompetence, corruption and sheer bloody crookery doesn't lessen its attraction one iota. It's so like the Westminster they have come to know and love that they are all bound to feel perfectly at home.
So, when politicians interpret the EU election results, this is the prism through which they view them. The fact that number 2 in the ballot in many parts of the country was a we-want-out-of -Europe party (UKIP) is an inconvenience to be ignored. They rationalised the switch to UKIP ( or the BNP ) as a simple protest vote. The voters didn't really understand the issues because they hadn't been put simply enough and had placed their cross next to UKIP or BNP as a form of punishment. Ergo, the problem was not one of voter disenchantment, but simply one of failed communication. If only Gordon and Peter could simplify the core message the problems would all melt away as the electorate, once again, was regailed with visions of sunlit uplands, where there was never any boom-or-bust, and the skies are not cloudy or grey.
It never really seems to get through to any of them - Tory or LibDem as much as Labour- that it is precisely this kind of self-absorbed arrogance that really gets people's goat. Obviously, some people voted the way they did to send the big parties a message. But, many placed their crosses where they did having carefully evaluated the options available to them. Until the main parties, and especialliy Labour, take this simple fact on board they will never win back the people who have deserted them.
Apart from being found wallowing up to their armpits in the exes trough, nothing exercises our Westminster political reperesentatives more than the idea of people wasting their votes on fringe candidates who refuse to behave like proper politicians: People who spend their own time and money getting their names on the ballot paper in order to pursue a cause or make a difference.
It's enough to get Politics a bad name.
That's why, in the wake of the Local and European elections we have had people like Harridan Harperson sliding in and out of radio and TV studios and claiming that the electorate had used the ballot box to deliver a sharp, wake up call to Labour and the other mainstream parties.
Let's get something straight. The main message the electorate sent Labour was that they didn't like its leader, its policies and, most of all, its arrogant disregard for the concerns of ordinary people. The expenses scandal was just the latest - and most blatant - manifestation of that arrogance. So what has been the party's response to this outpouring of dislike? An exhibition of collective guilt perhaps? A ceremonial donning of sack cloth and ashes? Even an admission that their policies might have, just possibly, been ill-conceived and ineptly executed?
Many things have occurred but none of them remotely like any of the above. A series of nonentities, nobodies and mediocrities has rapidly abandoned ship, each closely accompanied by a painfully thin list of their own accomplishments cunningly disguised as a letter of resignation. These missives contain many references to ME and The PARTY. What they signally fail to contain is any mention of country.
Gordon is still getting on with the job of running the country and saving the world yet still makes time to mutter about the need for Constitutional reform. The same old arguments about the superiority of Proportional Representation have surfaced, encouraged by ministers who hope that therein lies a magic formula for survival. (Strange how every administration that gets hammered at the ballot box touts PR as the most democratic voting system - until results improve or they get re-elected, when they suddenly decide that nothing can beat the dear old first past the post system after all. )
The main purpose of this activity is to distract the electorate from the real issues. What our political elites have chosen - and are still choosing - to ignore is the very simple message that we also don't like Europe. We are fed up with having 80% of our laws dictated to us from a bunker somewhere in Brussels. We are not convinced that allowing Spanish ships to hoover all the fish out of our territorial waters is a good idea; or that European judges from such noted democracies as Albania and Romania should be the final arbiters in our Justice system. Even now, most of us struggle with the proposition that decisions taken in Brussels that outweigh Laws made in Westminster really represent the apogee of democratic governance.
This is where your average politician of whatever stripe puts his or her fingers in their ears and makes nannannnanna sounds. Because, it's not what they want to hear.
Europe is good.
Outside the EU we would be just a small island with no influence and no voice in the world. (That's always been one of my favourites; as if, somehow, being part of Europe changed our geographical location and, once we leave, we'll be towed back into a little backwater where no one will ever take any notice of us again.)
If we leave Europe, major companies like Volkswagen, Renault, BMW and their ilk, will no longer want to do business with us. That's right, on the orders of Frau Merkel or Monsieur Zarkosy, their CEOs will close their UK operations and simply ignore a market where new car sales run at 2 million a year, . It would certainly be fun listening to them explaining that decision at their respective AGMs.
The simple fact of the matter is, politicians like the EU because it's like the UK - only much, much bigger. Hence, there is more money sloshing around; the decisions affect vastly more people and the ministers and apparatchiks making them acquire even more power. The fact that the whole bangshoot is riddled with incompetence, corruption and sheer bloody crookery doesn't lessen its attraction one iota. It's so like the Westminster they have come to know and love that they are all bound to feel perfectly at home.
So, when politicians interpret the EU election results, this is the prism through which they view them. The fact that number 2 in the ballot in many parts of the country was a we-want-out-of -Europe party (UKIP) is an inconvenience to be ignored. They rationalised the switch to UKIP ( or the BNP ) as a simple protest vote. The voters didn't really understand the issues because they hadn't been put simply enough and had placed their cross next to UKIP or BNP as a form of punishment. Ergo, the problem was not one of voter disenchantment, but simply one of failed communication. If only Gordon and Peter could simplify the core message the problems would all melt away as the electorate, once again, was regailed with visions of sunlit uplands, where there was never any boom-or-bust, and the skies are not cloudy or grey.
It never really seems to get through to any of them - Tory or LibDem as much as Labour- that it is precisely this kind of self-absorbed arrogance that really gets people's goat. Obviously, some people voted the way they did to send the big parties a message. But, many placed their crosses where they did having carefully evaluated the options available to them. Until the main parties, and especialliy Labour, take this simple fact on board they will never win back the people who have deserted them.
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