BT – lacking a clue

I’ve just received one of those irritating telesales calls. I don’t get many, because I’m registered with the Telephone Preference Service. But this one was especially annoying because it was from BT – a company which (one would have thought) would be sensitive to the fact that a lot of people dislike sales calls and would know about the TPS.

Anyway – I sent them a frosty (but polite) email via their web site. If I get a reply I’ll post it.

Bad grammar

Here’s a lovely piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education: 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, by Geoffrey K. Pullum. It gives Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style a damn good kicking for its nonsensical, ungrammatical and wrong advice on how to write.

Probably the only thing wrong with Pullum’s piece is that he doesn’t also take aim at other guides to style and grammar, which also deserve to be shredded. And yet I suspect that there are many people who would go to the barricades to defend their favourite example. Why? Because they need a set of rules to cling to so that they can avoid ever having to use their own judgement.

It’s a religion for these people (and I choose that metaphor carefully – the deference of the religious to undeserved authority is very similar). ‘Thou shalt not split an infinitive’ might as well have been handed down on a stone tablet. One word sentences? Never! Verbless sentences? Heresy! And the worst of it is that when you attempt to improve their leaden prose, they’ll quote the ‘rules’ of grammar at you as though they were as inviolable as physical laws, and will refuse to listen to any argument.

Listen: grammatical rules are merely conventions. By generally adhering to them we make sure that most of our writing is comprehensible to typical readers. But it’s up to the writer to decide when to abide by the conventions. If ‘To boldly go…’ sounds better than ‘To go boldly…’, then trust your ear, not some stuffy old book.

If you really want to write well, learn the rules of grammar.

And then break them.

IKEA rant

‘Let’s go to IKEA‘ I said. There were a few things that I wanted, so it seemed a reasonable way to spend a Sunday afternoon, especially as squally, sleety showers were sweeping by.

We picked up a few things, but one item couldn’t be found, and another was only available by going to a separate part of the store after passing through the checkouts. The lady’s back was starting to play up, so we decided to go home and order what we wanted from the web site. Guess what? Both items could be viewed but not bought online! They weren’t out of stock – just not available for purchase. Closer examination of the site showed that this seemed to be true of the majority of products. IKEA really doesn’t understand the Internet – very, very annoying, and they will suffer.

Lacking Polish

Not too many people speak Polish (outside of Poland, where it’s presumably quite popular), but the Irish police would have found it useful in this story. After fruitlessly searching for serial traffic offender Prawo Jazdy, they eventually twigged that the name that they had dutifully been logging on their computer actually means ‘driving licence’ in Polish.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Trebuchet’s first fling

So – a trebuchet is a device for throwing stuff over castle walls. Or – rather more specifically – a peculiar kind of endgame in chess in which the player to move loses:

The trebuchet endgame: whoever moves loses

In the diagram, White is playing up the board. Neither pawn can move, so whoever has the move has to move the king. Unfortunately, there’s no way for the king to protect the pawn, so the other player will capture the pawn and win by promoting the last pawn to a queen.

This trebuchet is going to throw stuff over the wall to see what effect it has. Not much, probably, but at least I’ll have fun writing it.