Friday, 25 July 2008
The revenge of the sub
This isn't the first time Coren has done this type of thing. His previous victim was fellow reviewer Feargus O'Sullivan. Before that, an unfortunate magazine sub-editor caught both barrels of Coren's direct email style for altering the typographers favourite phrase, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
According to Giles, this latest email is "ancient". Could its leaking be connected with the recent emergence of a foul-mouthed Coren caricature on twitter? This assumed-to-be poseur kept me amused this week but has now sadly (if understandably) been booted from the service.
So is this an example of the sub's (or subs') revenge? The suspect list must include Owen, Amanda, Ben and Tony from the Times' editorial team who were the apparent targets of Coren's rage.
**Update: The Times subs have responded.
Labels: Giles Coren, guardian, rants, the Times, twitter
posted by Gez at 3:46 pm
1 Comments
Thursday, 20 December 2007
Easy Ryder
The excerpt comes from an interview with ice hockey-haired one-time benefit-botherer Kym Ryder:
The same mistake is, happily, made in the online version . Very good, theguardian, very good.
Labels: apostrophe abuse, bird in Corrie, dirty Wigan lass, grammar, guardian, you're, your
posted by Dan at 3:05 pm
3 Comments
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Pinker on language
As interesting as the interview is, whenever I hear intellectual discussion about language I can't help but think of that old Fry and Laurie sketch. To listen to the whole interview click here (or download the target file and listen to it later).
Labels: guardian, language, profanity, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker
posted by Gez at 8:18 am
1 Comments
Saturday, 27 October 2007
What the f---?
I was recently surprised to discover that GrammarBlog lost 38 subscribers following the publishing of 'Thanx' (which contains a naughty word meaning poo). I wouldn't have thought our readers are quite so sensitive.
We have previously decided that GrammarBlog should follow the Guardian style guide when it comes to swear words; however I censored the title of this post so those easily offended would be given a fighting chance of avoiding personal turmoil. In order to avoid an en masse unsubscription please heed the below warning.
If you are of a linguistically sensitive disposition, particularly with regards to expletives, please read no further. If you do read on please be aware that this post contains some pretty fucking strong language.
Right, now those prissy twats have fucked off, the rest of us can address the important business at hand. Stephen Pinker has written a great article for the The New Republic in which the Harvard psychology professor sorts through some of the paradoxes of profanity. In particular, Pinker looks at the futility and stupidity of the Clean Airways Act which caused a bit of a kerfuffle a few years back by trying to define the profanity of seven well known swear words in all possible contexts. Apart from the morality issue, Pinker points out that the sheer unorthodoxy of swearing grammar makes the contexts difficult to pin down, especially if the persons proposing the bill are linguistic morons.
[Regarding] the syntactic classification of curse words. Ose’s grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as “phrases,” it didn’t even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between 'Drown the lazy cat' and 'Drown the cat which is lazy'. But 'Drown the fucking cat' is certainly not interchangeable with 'Drown the cat which is fucking'.It's interesting to note that the catalyst for the Clean Airways Act was a man who, for me at least, creates an uncontrollable urge to use the worst expletives known to mankind. I'm referring of course to that most irrepressible of utter cunts: Bono.
If the fucking in 'fucking brilliant' is to be assigned a traditional part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet “adverb” is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren’t genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say 'That’s too fucking bad', you can’t say 'That’s too very bad'. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue 'How brilliant was it? Very', you would never hear the dialogue 'How brilliant was it? Fucking'.
Five minutes and forty-four seconds into this clip, Bono says the dreaded F-word live on NBC. The network was not charged with profanity due to a subsequent FCC ruling stating that their definition of indecent only covers "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities". NBC were let off the hook as Bono used the word merely as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation." Conservative America was appalled and an idiotic politician named Doug Ose tried to secure a few reactionary votes by attempting to pass a ridiculous bill. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Fucked if I know.
**UPDATE** It appears the New Republic has removed Pinker's article. Luckily, you can still read it here.
Labels: Bono, grammar, guardian, profanity, Steven Pinker, video
posted by Gez at 11:15 pm
8 Comments
Friday, 26 October 2007
An Blog Entry by a Irritated Man
Inspired by a trip to a local restaurant, my good lady wife and I now enjoy getting ‘an’ and ‘a’ the wrong way around. This, taken from their menu, is why:
Leaving aside the tautological content of this menu filler (why didn’t they just leave a space there? Which words could possibly add to the enjoyment of a meal apart from ‘Your meal tonight will be served by a wheelchair-bound Margaret Thatcher, who has just 15 minutes left to live. Feel free to kick her up the arse as you see fit and empty the contents of your pickle tray onto her rotting corpse’), just how did they get this so wrong?
They certainly aren’t alone. This appeared in the Guardian’s G2 section a couple of weeks back:
Oh dear.
posted by Dan at 1:22 pm
89 Comments
Thursday, 13 September 2007
You really do bring it on yourself, Guardian
Below is a picture of the top-half of today’s front page:
They’ve forgotten to put the word ‘strike’ in their headline, haven’t they? Their HEADLINE. I think it is 'strike' as the text below says “Al-Qaida…has the capacity to carry out a spectacular strike”.
However, it is possible that they meant it, and have used phraseology more commonly seen in adverts for firework nights and such like. Possible, I said.
posted by Dan at 2:59 pm
5 Comments
Wednesday, 12 September 2007
"Middlesborough's" Guardian Angels
In their ‘irreverent’ ‘Football Diary’ section the next week, The Guardian newspaper made satirical mention of the piece. This was sumptuously ironic as they were, and still are, by far the most frequent culprits of this crime against spelling, sense, atlases (oh how I wish the plural were ‘atlai’) and encyclopaedias (ditto ‘encyclopaedi’, although that does sound a bit like a trendy name for the Sex Offenders’ Register).
Further, the region Middlesbrough is located in often appears as ‘Teeside’ (it is ‘Teesside’, as in beside the River Tees). I have written to the Guardian on several occasions in the last year alone on both counts, but replies there have come none, to use an incredibly irritating current linguistic style (see “up with that they will not put”).
Today, though, the sub-editors of the newspaper have surpassed themselves.
The letters page in the Sports section carries missives directly next to each other in which BOTH spellings are used:
What a logic defying approach to sub-editing. Schizophrenic, in fact. Or, perhaps the sub-editor was a bit like a flawed character from a rubbish sitcom who couldn’t decide which ‘gal’ to take to dinner (Middlesbrough or Middlesborough?) so dated both at once, despite there being no apparent need to do so.
As if that was not enough, look at the headline above the second letter. Unless they are making a pun on that well known phrase about the pleasure of surprisingly stumbling upon a tightly braided rope, then I think, Betty, they’ve done another whoopsie.
This country.
Labels: guardian, middlesbrough, spelling
posted by Dan at 3:24 pm
9 Comments
GrammarBlog has moved
We are now live at http://www.grammarblog.co.uk/
Contact us
If you want to tell us your pet peeves, send us examples of grammar abuse you have witnessed or even ask our advice on grammar matters, we'd love to hear from you. Email us on 
Subscribe and Share
Previous Posts
Archives
Friends
- 1000 Tiny Things I Hate
- AA Gill's Times Column
- Apostrophe Abuse
- SPOGG
- Stephen Fry's blog
- The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
- Mighty Red Pen
- lowercase L
- Literally a web log
- Elisabeth Writes
- Never in all my life
- The Engine Room
- I Love Typography
- spEak You’re bRanes
- Passive Aggressive Notes
- T.E.A.L.
Enemies (aka The List)
Reading List
It's not just you
