iPhone language

I've just been enjoying Johnson Banks' latest Thought for the Week: Me and my iPhone speak a different language.

Apart from sub-editing quibbles with the title (it really ought to be My iPhone and I speak different languages, of course), I found myself nodding along with Michael's whinge about the iPhone's predictive text.

It's the apostrophe predictions that really annoy me. Every time I have to write what the hell (and I do more often than you'd think), I end up with what the he'll. The iPhone also insists on turning my possessive itses into it'ses. And so it goes on.

As a fanatical Twitterer, this is a significant pain in the backside. I tweet a great deal from my iPhone - as my wife will be only too glad to tell you, along with gnashing teeth and rolling eyes. Then there's all the usual emails and texts one ends up sending on the move these days.

As a writer, I'm naturally keen that everything I send out into the world is correct (or at least is the way I want it to be). And as a professional writer, all these things - emails, texts, tweets, blog posts - are little calling cards for me. So it's infuriating when technology insists on ducking them up (as the iPhone would have me write it).

But as I smiled along to Michael's rant, I remembered the most important thing I've learnt about Apple technology, which is that it's almost always better and simpler than you think it is. (Especially if you have any experience of PCs, which inculcate one with the sense that computers have to be incredibly complicated to use, as well as unreliable.)

Based on that oft-learnt lesson, I quickly checked the Settings menu on my iPhone. And there, under 'Keyboard', was the little toggle switch I needed: Auto-correction on/off. Bingo.

I still think they could fine-tune the predictive text - why the hell am I more likely to be saying he'll every time? But once again, I've been reminded that with Apple, the answer is usually a (very intuitive) click or two away. And I've fallen a little more in love with my iPhone.

It's not 'laying people off', it's 'synergy-related headcount restructuring'

Thanks to my friends at 26, I've been alerted to this quite extraordinary bit of corporate language-mangling by Nokia Siemens Networks.



And that's just the first paragraph.

I'm not sure what people feel is gained by this sort of language. We all know what they mean, so why not be straight about it? They've merged, and that means they don't need so many people. It's an unpleasant fact of corporate life, but it is a fact and we all know it.

Jargon like this makes the brand look silly - surely they don't think anyone is fooled by it? It also makes them look a bit shifty and deceptive, unprepared simply to stand by its actions.

Listen to this: "At the completion of the planned synergy-related headcount restructuring activities, Nokia Siemens Networks expects to have in the range of 7,000 employees in Finland, from an initial base of approximately 9,200."

Seven stodgy paragraphs in and they're not letting go of that enormous phrase, "synergy-related headcount restructuring activities". And they've tied themselves in linguistic knots trying not to say, "We're cutting 2,200 jobs." Of course, we can all do the maths and we can all see through the smoke. So why bother?

All this reminds me of a recent News Quiz on Radio 4, in which Jeremy Hardy ruminated that new jobs are always "created", but cut jobs are simply "lost", as if the organisations were not involved. "Oh, sorry, Bob, your job's lost. We don't know where it's gone. It never turned up. Better not come in. Ever again."

Why does it matter if we make less mistakes?

So, Tesco has finally bowed to those who insisted they change their '10 items or less' signs. And, pedantic as it seems, I'm delighted.

Of course, no one was confused by these signs. Their meaning was obvious, and you could argue that the new ones, saying 'Up to 10 items', are minutely less clear. Where's the cut-off? At nine or ten?

So why does it matter which we use: less or fewer? It matters because sometimes things aren't as clear as a Tesco sign.

The other day, someone was telling me some fact or other about a nearby area. I can't even remember what, but it involved the phrase, 'because there are less affluent families there'.

What she meant was, 'There are fewer affluent families there.' Not that the families there were less affluent. It's subtle, but it makes quite a big difference. If she'd been in the habit of using less and fewer correctly, she wouldn't even have had to think about it, any more than she'd think about whether to say I am or I is. And she'd have said what she wanted to say.


Less money (an amount of something, like gravy or sunlight).


Fewer coins (individual things you can count, like stones or widgets).

When language is used badly in the public realm, as in Tesco stores, the mistakes take on a certain authority. They become more embedded in the collective consciousness. We stop caring so much about silly, pedantic points like less vs fewer. And our language becomes a little more blurred, a little less clear. We're less able to say what we actually mean.

That's why it matters. Not because The Rules Say So. (Indeed, anyone searching for a clear rulebook on English will have a long and frustrating quest.) But because it sacrifices clarity. It might not matter at the checkout, but when you go to a job interview, or want to write to your MP, or just tell someone something interesting, you might find it matters a great deal.

(I have to add that it's a shame to read Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign quoted as saying some people get 'really roused up' by the misuse of less and fewer. What a startlingly ugly bit of English.)

God bless pedants.

Picture pinched from the BBC homepage because this 'literally' thing one of my special bugbears.

You can rely on certain factions of the British public to get very hot under the collar about language. And I for one love them for it.

The BBC has listed 20 of the top language foibles its readers have griped about. Here's the short version, with notes:

1. Of for have, as in 'I could of killed him...'
2. For free, which is the one my father-in-law always gets excited about.
   
3. 12pm, which is splendidly picky. It doesn't exist, says the reader, and he's right, really.
4. Effect vs Affect
5. The grocer's apostrophe, of course. (Apple's, Banana's, etc.)
6. I vs Me, which is a favourite. (All you have to do is take out the other person. Should it be 'They made tea for Mike and I'? No, because you'd never say, 'They made tea for I.')
7. Yourself or myself instead of you or me. It makes this chap's blood boil. How marvellous.
8. None of them are vs None of them is. Like the reader, I thought the latter was correct, because 'none'='no one'. The BBC quotes Fowler to prove us both wrong. You're always learning in this game.
9. Another classic: different to (should be from) and compared to (should be with). Again, the BBC notes that Fowler is against this.
10. A wonderfully arcane argument against the common meaning of 'open fire'.
11. The literally thing, which literally makes my blood boil.
12. The whole It's vs Its conundrum. It's really not that hard.
    
13. They're / Their / There and To / Two / Too, which are driving a secondary school teacher to despair, God help us.
14. Due to instead of owing to. 'But then,' says the contributor candidly, 'I'm a pedant.'
15. Apparently children are increasingly saying lend instead of borrow. ('Can I lend your pencil?')
16. Amount of people instead of number of people. The BBC again calls on Fowler, and the argument, as with less and fewer, that you use amount for an uncountable mass, like gravy or sand, and number for countable things like coins or houses. But surely 'people' are countable, at least in principle? I agree with the reader, it should be a number of people, as it should be fewer people.
17. By foot instead of on foot. Blimey.
18. Another of the ones that gets me: singular nouns with plural verbs. So 'The team are ready', 'The audience get restless' or 'The group stand on stage'. Is, gets, stands!
19. One chap is struggling with prepositions at the ends of sentences. ('This is the town I went to,' or 'They're at the table I sat at.') This always seems to me an elegance question. If it sounds ugly the 'correct' way, don't 'correct' it. As Churchill apparently said, when corrected in this way, 'This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.'
20. Stadiums instead of stadia.
    

Staggeringly, none of them is/are about And at the start of a sentence. Perhaps my mailer has done the trick.

What's your Question Mark Inside?

I've just come from tea and cakes at the Chapter House of St Paul's Cathedral. This is not the sort of thing I do every day, as you might imagine. In fact, I've never done it before and probably won't again. So I should thank Martin Firrell for inviting me.

Martin is a public artist, known for projecting often provocative messages onto public buildings. (He's also a branding consultant and writer, off and on, which is how I met him.)

He's been commissioned to create a work to celebrate the 300th Anniversary of the topping-out of St Paul's. His response is The Question Mark Inside: an attempt to explore that part of ourselves that leads people to religion or other forms of spirituality. The part that wrestles with all the big questions - why are we here? What's the meaning of life? What's the secret of happiness? All that stuff.

The project blog invites people to contribute their own thoughts on the subject, and has become an archive of deep thoughts from around the world (and some not so deep). Martin's plan, as he told the assembled throng at the Chapter House today, is to 'put all these thoughts into the hugest blender in the world, and press pulse, and create a Question Mark smoothie. Then I'll spread some of that smoothie onto the dome of St Paul's'. Well, there's a thought.

It's an ambitious plan, and an exciting one. The first sneak preview will be on 8 November, to coincide with the Lord Mayor's Show, and then there will be a full, three-week run of the project later that month. Martin and the Cathedral are busily fundraising for the project, so if you feel like helping - either in cash or in kind - you can email emma at martinfirrell dot com with offers.

Why it's important to capitalise proper nouns

From the BBC website this morning. Enough said, I think.

Well, for starters...

I just saw this in my local branch. All my Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells instincts erupted in a moment.

Inside, they repeat the headline. But this time without the offending mark. So not only are they incorrect, they're also inconsistent.

Why oh why oh why, etc.

When 'I will' means 'I won't'

It's funny what you learn in this job. For example, I've been working with Mint, a design agency in Jordan, recently. Together, we named a new property development company in Dubai, which is creating some of the most exclusive and luxurious residences in the world. (And they really are: all hyperbole permitted on this one.)

With the name in place (it's still a secret), I started work on some marketing materials for the two islands they're developing. (See what I mean?)

I was describing a vision of what was to come, rather than an existing property, so I naturally slipped into the future tense: 'We will create the ultimate in luxury,' etc, etc.

This prompted a call from Tania at Mint, who explained that in her part of the world, if you say 'I will do something', everyone understands that to mean it'll never happen.

Of course, we have something like that over here - it's called builderspeak - but it seems to be the generally accepted meaning in the United Arab Emirates. Curious, eh?

What it meant was, I had to write about something in the future while avoiding the future tense. You try it sometime. It's not easy. (Thankfully, I seem to have pulled it off.)

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The sentence above is really that: a sentence. Thanks to Jim Davies of writers' group 26, I've discovered this wonderful thing, as well as many other similar sentences, on a great Wikipedia page.

How can this ridiculous construction be a real sentence? Well, first you have to know that 'buffalo' is an obscure verb meaning 'bully'. (I didn't.) And, of course, that Buffalo is a city in America. (New York state, to be precise.)

That means you can construct this mad sentence, which means, in extended form:

'The buffalos from Buffalo that buffalos from Buffalo bully ('buffalo') also bully other buffalos from Buffalo.'

It may be clearer if you try the sentence with people instead of buffalo:

'Buffalo people Buffalo people buffalo buffalo Buffalo people.'

Or it may not.

This is exactly the sort of thing that can keep me from proper work for hours on end. Enjoy.