Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Language and Reference

  • Words Know No Borders…

  • Reading Between The Lines

    Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore has published a blog post today that has caused a slight disturbance amongst the company’s fans: Your Windows 10 PC will love all the devices you own.

    The reason for their discomfiture is that Microsoft is intent on bringing features, which hitherto have been unique to Windows, to rival smartphone operating systems. Personally, I think it’s an understandable strategy, and one that Microsoft has already shown that it wants to pursue.

    However, the post also caused me some discomfort, but not for the above reasons. My hackles went up with Belfiore’s opening sentence:

    Whether it’s a 3-year-old printer or projecting to your brand new TV with Miracast, we’re building Windows 10 to be terrific at connecting all your devices.

    Mr. Belfiore seems to be implying that a 3-year-old device is pretty well obsolete, and at the limits of supportability. I have an HP Laserjet 5MP printer that is still going strong, 20 years after I bought it. It almost sounds as though it will be more by luck than judgement that such devices will continue to work in Microsoft’s brave new world of Windows 10.

    The other part of the post that caused a slight intake of breath was where he wrote:

    Join the Windows Insider Program to try out the Phone Companion app on a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build we’ll flight out in a few weeks.

    “…flight out”? That’s a new verb to me, and a particularly ugly one to boot. What’s wrong with simply saying “we’ll release in a few weeks”? I realise that language constantly evolves, but does it have to do so in such awkward ways? However, I’m probably fighting a lost cause for British English here. I remember, with a shudder, the first time I heard an American airline stewardess announce on arrival in America that we should deplane. That was years ago, and I still haven’t got used to it.

  • Management Speak

    Steven Poole has hit a nerve with his article in the Guardian on 10 of the worst examples of management speak. It’s got over 1,800 comments all of them expressing their loathing of management speak.

    It reminds me of the old joke, which I came across at least ten years ago, of the Accenture consultant’s answer to the question of why did the chicken cross the road. It was a perfect echo of the language that was being used at my place of work:

    “Deregulation of the chicken’s side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Accenture, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM) Accenture helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge capital and experiences to align the chicken’s people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Accenture convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Accenture consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park like setting enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken’s mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Accenture helped the chicken change to become more successful.”

  • On Being A Grammar Pedant

    Few things are guaranteed to irritate me more than bad grammar. Yes, I know that my reaction is out of all proportion to the sin, but it is the way that I was brought up.

    For example, yesterday I made a complaint to Microsoft about some applications in the Windows Store. Today, I received a polite response back from Microsoft Support to acknowledge my feedback. It was signed:

    Isabelle L.

    You’re Partner at Microsoft
    Use what you know. Do what you’ve always imagine

    My eyes were caught by that “You’re” – so much so that I completely missed the fact that “imagine” should be “imagined”. I decided that I could not let this affront to the Queen’s English slide, so I replied to Isabelle thus:

    Dear Isabelle L.,
     
    Thank you for your response to my feedback.
     
    Could I just point out that you have a grammatical error in your signature?
     
    It should, I think, be:
     
    “Your Partner at Microsoft”
     
    and not “You’re Partner at Microsoft”; “You’re” is the abbreviated form of “You are”.
     
    Such grammatical mistakes do not give a positive feeling about the quality of Microsoft’s customer support.
     
    Yours sincerely,
     
    Geoff Coupe

    I have just had a reply back from her. It reads:

    Hi Geoff,
     
    Thanks for your observation. Greatly appreciated. I modified that.
     
    Isabelle L.
    You are Partner at Microsoft
    Use what you know. Do what you’ve always imagine

    Sigh. I think that I should just count to ten in future.

  • Damn The Rising Inflection

    As you know, it doesn’t take much to get me going on a Victor Meldrew rant. One thing that is practically guaranteed to do it is to hear someone speak with a rising inflection at the end, or even during, their sentences when it is not appropriate. I was brought up to learn that the rising inflection (or High Rising Terminal) is reserved exclusively for signalling the asking of a question or to mark uncertainty in speech, and to hear it used any other way is akin to the reaction I have to fingernails being scraped down a blackboard…
     
    And when the rising inflection is coupled with adjectives such as "cool" or "awesome", then I have a tendency to become apopleptic. So, I present to you Dharmesh Mehta, Director of the Windows Live Team talking about the features on the upcoming version of Windows Live Messenger. The video is found on this page – it’s the one entitled Preview of the New Windows Live Messenger. I could hardly take in the meaning of what he was saying for the sound of my screaming. Watch out also for the excruciating banter between him and his colleague, who also drops the "Whatever" bomb…
     
     

  • The Twelve Days of Christmas

  • Warning – Purple Prose Ahead

    Steven Poole draws our attention to a strangely fascinating opening sentence:
    Pigeons rustled in the beams of the Staten Island Ferry terminal as Rebecca Miller, the writer and director, ordered a soft pretzel.
    It comes from a New Yorker article, so I suppose one should expect nothing less. Still, it does seem like a worthy contender for a Bulwer-Lytton prize.

  • The Etymology of “Go Forth and Multiply”

    This is a wonderful piece of research on the word "fuck" and all who sail in her.

  • Multi-lingual Puns

    Most excellent news about Karadzic. Today’s Volkskrant has a rather brilliant wordplay comment on the event in its daily "Gorilla" cartoon:
    Een baard!
    Een baard!
    Mijn koninkrijk
    voor een baard!
    Which literally translates as: "A beard! A beard! My kingdom for a beard!" In Dutch, the word for horse is paard, hence the pun.
     

  • Serbian Biscuits

    Nicey, over at a NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown, discovers some biscuits from Serbia with a rather unfortunate name… I wonder if Kees Moeliker would like them?

  • How High Is The Bar?

    There’s a fad going round at the moment whereby anyone can test the reading comprehension level required for a given blog. Apparently, I set the bar fairly low:
    cash advance 
     
    I’m actually quite pleased by this. I take it to mean that I express myself in terms that a wide audience can understand, rather than the content itself is overly simple. Well, that’s my rationalisation, anyway…

  • Standard Procedure

    Steven Poole, over at Unspeak, makes me ponder the phrase Standard Procedure…

  • Extensive Travel

    Steven Poole salutes NASA for doing what it says on the tin. 

  • Be Prepared

    Here’s a handy-dandy guide to propaganda and debating tricks. Train yourself to spot when they’re being deployed (by politicians, practically all the time these days, it would seem). Very useful. 
     
    (hat tip to Larry Moran of Sandwalk for the link)

  • Pronunciation

    Jerome Weeks tells a good, and possibly apocryphal, tale about a student who completes her dissertation on Samuel Pepys without ever realising that she has never learned the correct pronunciation of his name. Speaking as someone who didn’t realise until recently that Pharyngula was pronounced so as to rhyme with "singular", I’m certainly in no position to cast the first stone.

  • Architect Or Car Salesman?

    Steven Poole, over at the excellent Unspeak blog, takes a look at Frank Luntz’s latest book "Words That Work". It’s fair to say that he’s not impressed, and gives ample evidence to back up his opinion. Oh, and I can substantiate Poole’s puzzlement over the meaning of the word napkin. In my lifetime of nearly sixty years, it was never to be confused with the separate word nappy. Indeed I have a dictionary published thirty years ago that clearly lists both words and their totally separate meanings. So much for Luntz’s bizarre theory that thirty years ago, we British believed napkins were nappies.
     
    Luntz apparently thinks of himself as a "language architect". On this showing, he comes across more as a particularly oleaginous used car salesman. The only difference between Luntz and a used car salesman appears to be that the latter knows when he’s lying. Best avoided at all costs.

  • Everything Is Miscellaneous

    That’s the title of both a book and a talk given by David Weinberger. The talk (given at Google) is interesting and worth watching. I’m now intrigued about the book.
     
    (hat tip to Tim at the Thingology Blog for the link)

  • Safety First

    The Silly Season in the media seems to be coming earlier every year. Here’s the story of a Welsh council which has banned its workers from answering the phone in Welsh because of fears from the union that "it could damage their voice". But it gets better, a councillor has condemned the ban as "an infringement of human rights". Oh, pur-lease!
     
    Dunno about Welsh damaging one’s voice, they should think themselves lucky that they don’t have to speak Dutch…

  • Quantum Feminism

    I’ve often bemoaned my irritation with management speak here. But the irritations are merely pinpricks in comparison with some of the writing that can be found lurking under the stone of PostModernist critique.
     
    Here’s a particularly fine example penned by Carolyn G. Guertin, Senior McLuhan Fellow at the University of Texas. Reading it gives me the feeling of repeatedly bashing my head against a brick wall – and I feel so much better when I stop. Luckily, Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, pricks Guertin’s pomposity in an effective manner, and David Thompson literally rips it to shreds.

  • Lost In Translation

    At least, I hope it was. Surely the Japanese Health Minister didn’t really refer to women as "birth-giving machines"?