Mind your language
SOME New Year pet hates.
Mr Neville Barwick of Bath hates advisor for adviser 'which we shall have to accept because bad always drives out good'. I agree that this Gresham's law of language seems only too universal. It also applies to the annoying confusion of infer and imply. Of course many examples of the former being used for the latter can be found over the past four centuries, but it is a useful distinc- tion which it is a pity to lose. Mr Bar- wick also hates media as a singular; that doesn't bother me too much (it is at least used as a collective noun), but I hate the equally common phenomena as a singular.
Mr Arthur Brack from Edinburgh cannot stand 'idiots who write a dash across the stem of the figure 7'. He realises that the continentals do it to distinguish 7 from 1, but wonders how many times a careless dash on a British 7 has converted it into a 4.
Mrs Olive Ordish of Penzance as a translator is particularly irritated by lumpen being used to mean 'lumpy', whereas the German means 'ragged' (as, of course, in Lumpenproletariat).
Mr Arnold Wilson of Bath is enraged by a prosodic feature of wireless announcers, who so often put the stress on the wrong word. 'It will be windy today,' they say. And railway guards (sorry, 'conductors') say, `Chippenham will be the next stop.' Yes, well I sup- pose that is a bit annoying. But I couldn't help laughing when the 'senior conductor' on the train from York `advised customers' to have their 'travel documents ready for inspection'.
Happy hating in 1995.
Dot Wordsworth
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