Then off you go, it’s first on the left. by Vrangtante Brun via Flickr OK. Better now? It’s not that kind of wee I want to talk about. It’s the wee “we”, a pronoun – first person plural. Clearly it’s a very useful little world. “We are a grandmother,” wouldn’t have the same whiff of […]
Don’t put a g in my sandwich
OK, I listen to a lot of radio and if the radio’s not on, I’m probably eavesdropping. So I hear a lot of words. Perhaps that qualifies me to make the following observations. You don’t need to say ‘impact upon’ when you really mean ‘affect’. Changing tack means you are trying a different direction. Changing […]
What’s on my mind this week (the really not very exciting version)
Have you ever had so much to write about that you didn’t know where to start? And as a result didn’t start at all? That’s me this week. Not, of course, that any of it is very exciting. Nothing in the realm of ‘you’ll never believe this’ or even ‘wow’, just ordinary stuff, only lots […]
Pulling together to move forward with transparency…
And other equally irritating phrases. I was directed, the other day, to John Rentoul’s round up of banned expressions. A splendid celebration of the cliche, the slackardly sayings and the downright nasty newspeak – the kind of phrases that induce indigestion. His streaming heap includes “scalable”, “baby steps” and “scientifically proven”. To his linguistic gravy […]
Stop talking rubbish and mangling our language
If you’re not careful, there’s potench for murder It’s funny how they say that the red mist descends. In my case, it rises, boiling up from the pit of somewhere dark until everything is fury. This week it was a chirpy PR person’s query about whether or not the thing he had just sent me […]