Mind your language
WE ALL make mistakes, but some of the more revealing are those tb do with proper names and with acronyms — I mean pronounceable words made up from initials.
On Classic FM, a wireless station of which some music snobs have unkindly made fun for getting the names of com- posers and opera wrong, I recently heard a news bulletin referring to con- toversy over a nuclear fuel reprocessing site 'at Thorp'. An easy mistake. The controversial site is near Sellafield (clev- erly renamed from Windscale after a lit- tle accident in the 1950s). It is not (yet) called Thorp. Thorp stands for 'Ther- mal Oxide Reprocessing Plant', not itself necessarily a saleable name for a new housing development.
And on the same channel they refer to firemen as 'fire-fighters'. I shouldn't be surprised to hear policemen being referred to as 'crime-fighters' soon. Just how many women train hoses on blazes? I tried to ask the National Asso- ciation of Fire Officers, but they never answer the telephone. Perhaps they're out fighting fires. But isn't 'fire-fighter' a rather bellicose term to use in our war-torn world?
Dot Wordsworth
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