headline news

With the advent of online editions of national newspapers, the art of writing succinct headlines appears to be in decline. Thirty years ago, Britain’s Sun newspaper employed subeditors whose only function was to write the headlines for which the paper became famous, but it may be that a different allocation of labour brought about by the online revolution now makes this a less efficient use of resources.

The rules for writing headlines are simple: never use a long word if a shorter word is available; and if a word can be cut out without affecting the meaning, then it should be cut. Obviously, any ill-judged application of the second rule has the potential to create ambiguity, but it is the first rule, and what it tells us about the lexicon available to the headline writers, that is the more interesting, particularly given that the shorter word that is used may not match the meaning of the longer word precisely.

In the language of headlines, any type of embargo, exclusion, injunction, interdiction, prevention, prohibition or proscription becomes a ban; any constraint, containment, demarcation, limitation or restriction becomes a cap; any abatement, contraction, curtailment, decrement, devaluation, downgrade, diminution, discount or shrinkage becomes a cut; any kind of accommodation, accord, agreement, bargain, compromise, concession, settlement, transaction or understanding becomes a deal; any kind of disparity, distinction, divergence, inconsistency or incongruity becomes a gap; any type of appointment, assignment, calling, career, employment, enterprise, occupation, profession, undertaking or vocation becomes a job; and any altercation, antagonism, argument, controversy, difference of opinion, disagreement, squabble or vendetta becomes a row. It will be seen at once that the short word isn’t always quite the right word, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the headline writers, whose aim is to have their creations set in the largest possible type.

Adjectives are not favoured by headline writers, although something that might be described as colossal, enormous, gargantuan, gigantic, humongous, immense or massive in other circumstances will be described as merely big, or possibly huge, in a newspaper headline. At the same time, anything that is abominable, defective, deleterious, dreadful, horrendous, horrible, imperfect, substandard, terrible, unacceptable or unsatisfactory would simply be bad.

There is another aspect to the writing of headlines, much favoured by Britain’s redtops, and that is the use of word play, including puns, rhymes, alliteration and assonance. Cultural references are also common—even the BBC, on its website, isn’t immune to this kind of headline. Although many such headlines are teeth-grindingly awful, I’ll conclude with two famous headlines from the Sun’s sports pages.

In 2000, Inverness Caledonian Thistle (affectionately known as ‘Cally’ by the team’s supporters) defeated Celtic, one of the powerhouses of Scottish football, 3–1 in a Scottish FA Cup match. Celtic were playing on their home ground, and Inverness were two leagues below Celtic in the Scottish football hierarchy. The Sun’s report on the match carried the following headline:

SUPER CALLY
GO BALLISTIC
CELTIC ARE
ATROCIOUS

I’d always remembered this headline as ‘…CELTIC WERE ATROCIOUS’, but it seems to have been plagiarized from a Liverpool Echo headline from the 1970s, when Liverpool forward Ian Callaghan produced a man-of-the-match performance to defeat Queen’s Park Rangers. The headline in that case read ‘SUPER CALLY GOES BALLISTIC QPR ATROCIOUS’. Although I’ve suggested plagiarism, the use of ‘are’ instead of ‘were’ to report on something that happened in the past points to another possible explanation: that it was a kind of homage to the earlier headline.

While I would expect most Sun readers to pick up on the Mary Poppins reference, I’m not sure that those same readers would be sufficiently familiar with pre-imperial Roman history to understand the following headline, which appeared above the report on an FA Cup match between Leicester City and Wycombe Wanderers in 2001. Leicester were the home team, but Wycombe, a team that played its league football three divisions below Leicester, won 2–1.

WYCOMBE
WE SAW
WE CONQUERED

Whether the historical reference was understood or not, it seems that Wycombe’s fans have since appropriated the phrase to describe every victory away from home.

bbc american

It is a well-known cliché that the United States of America and Great Britain are ‘two countries divided by a common language’, but I am beginning to wonder for how much longer this will continue to be true. When I started editing academic books in the early 1990s, I couldn’t help but notice that almost all the British authors whose work I edited wrote in American English, but over the past couple of years, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has also started to use American English, both online and on air. I wonder why.

I am not suggesting that British English is somehow superior to American English, or vice versa, but I do find this trend troubling, mainly because I foresee a time when the British way of saying or writing something will be labelled ‘incorrect’. This is unlikely to perturb younger readers, but for someone like me, who learned almost all I know about the syntax and vocabulary of my native language sixty years ago, it is hard to accept.

The most obvious difference between the two strains of English is in spelling, which is the one change the BBC has yet to make, perhaps because neither system is logically consistent. I have no problems with center and theater, although I will continue to write centre and theatre, but I would have thought it useful to distinguish between timbre and timber, which American English doesn’t. Another limitation of American English is a failure to distinguish between enquiry and inquiry, which have separate meanings in British English.

On the other hand, while rejecting the French gramme and kilogramme, the British still write programme, even though the word derives from the same root as anagram and diagram and should therefore be spelled program. The Americans are also on firmer ground with the –ize suffix, which derives from ancient Greek, through Latin, while the same suffix arrived in Britain through French as –ise, and we British have allowed far too much French influence over our language, particularly as regards pronunciation (cf. ballet, debris, debut, etc.). Incidentally, I’ve heard it argued that the best justification for using –ise is that it avoids the difficulty of remembering those words where –ise is the mandatory spelling (televise, advertise, chastise, compromise, etc.), but this is a fatuous line of reasoning that ignores the different origins of the suffix in these cases.

One area where American spelling definitely has the advantage is in words that formerly contained either an æ or an œ ligature (mediæval, encyclopædia, fœtid, etc.), which are much simplified by replacing that ligature with a simple ‘e’. The British appear to have followed this lead. However, during my time as an editor, I became aware that American philosophers tended to prefer æsthetic to esthetic, possibly for æsthetic reasons.

There are other comparisons that I could make with regard to spelling, but as noted the BBC has not yet adopted American spelling, so I will move on to an aspect of American English that grates on my ears every time I hear it: the conversion of words like appeal, graduate and protest from intransitive to pseudo-transitive verbs. My view is that ‘to appeal a verdict’ should be ‘to appeal against a verdict’; ‘to graduate college’ should be ‘to graduate from college’; and ‘to protest a decision’ should be ‘to protest against a decision’. However, how prepositions are used is one of the main differences between American and British English, which explains why, while railing against the omission of necessary prepositions, I regard the prepositions in ‘to meet with’, ‘to visit with’ and ‘to beat up on’ as superfluous.

Another bone of contention with me can be seen in a sentence like ‘the case has not been proven’, which has gained traction in Britain over the past decade. This is a grammatical blunder, because proven is not the past participle of prove but the past participle of the archaic verb preve (cf. weave, woven; cleave, cloven), so the sentence should read ‘the case has not been proved’.

American English scores over its British equivalent in its inventiveness and flexibility. More new words have been coined by American than by British writers, but my feeling is that American English is less precise. In support of this claim, I would cite the distinction between compare with and compare to, which is usually observed by British writers. Although my copy of the Associated Press stylebook does explain the difference, in my experience American writers tend to use ‘compare to’ in both cases.

However, perhaps the most egregious change that the BBC has made is to refer to the two major conflagrations of the twentieth century as ‘World War I’ and ‘World War II’, which always reminds me of Rambo III, Star Trek V and Superbowl XLIX and suggests a connection with the entertainment industry, not to mention the expectation that there will be a World War III, eventually. Leaving aside my tendency to refer to the First World War as the Great War—I grew up with a set of encyclopædias on my bookshelf that had been published in 1926—I can’t help but wonder how a country that missed three-quarters of the first conflict and a third of the second has managed to acquire the naming rights to both.

While I decry the Americanization of the BBC—the first ‘B’ stands for ‘British’, after all—there is a silver lining: I’ve always found that Americans are more likely to observe the distinction between defining and non-defining relative clauses, and I’ve not seen any horrors on the BBC News website recently like the one quoted in Relatively Incorrect. On the other hand, I suspect that it is only a matter of time before I hear references to the Thames River and the Tyne River on Radio 4’s Today program. Where will it all end?

no gentleman

Some of you will know that I sometimes use the pseudonym ‘lofuji’ in internet forums, and this post is about the origin of the name.

Lo Fu-ji (pinyin: Lao Fuzi) is the star of a comic strip that first appeared in Hong Kong in the 1960s, Lo/Lao being his surname and Fu-ji/Fuzi an archaic honorific roughly equivalent to Lo Esq. (Mr Lo would be Lo Sin Sang), which reflects his old-fashioned outlook on life. In fact, it would not be unfair to label him a reactionary. He has been marketed in the West as Old Master Q, a meaningless sobriquet.

The cover of each comic book is a comment on a typical aspect of life in Hong Kong. The cover pictured below is a particularly apposite example: it is impossible to play Chinese chess in public here without first attracting a few spectators, followed by at least one of those spectators telling the players which move they should make next. I gave up playing in public decades ago for precisely this reason, even though I’ve never been beaten by a Chinese opponent. I originally attributed this to disbelief that a gweilo would know how to play, but I regularly see games being played in parks and gardens in Hong Kong, and they always draw a small crowd, and there will always be at least one kibbitzer in that crowd. Incidentally, I also used to play wei ch’i in public, but I never received any advice from the sidelines, mainly because although most locals are aware that it is an ancient Chinese board game, few know how to play it.

Lo Fu-ji (red characters; back to the viewer on the above cover) has two friends: Chun Sin Sang (Mr Chun; yellow characters; Lo’s opponent), who wears what can almost be described as a modern uniform in Hong Kong, short-sleeved cotton shirt with slacks; and Tai Ban Siu (‘Big Sweet Potato’; light brown characters), who wears clothes that are similar to those worn by Lo. This is their standard attire, but all three regularly appear in costume in the strips.

Lo also has an enemy, Mr Chiu, who appears regularly in the actual strips but never on the cover. The pair frequently play vicious practical jokes on one another, and when they’re not doing this, they’re usually fighting. Lo comes out on top in some exchanges, but in others he is discomfited:

Be sure to start in the top right-hand corner and work downwards when reading each strip.

In fact, fighting and physical violence play a large part in the strips, from casual fisticuffs following a heated argument to being confronted in the street by a knife-wielding robber and Lo’s reaction. Lo is a kung fu expert, although this doesn’t always work in his favour:

There is also a strong element of the supernatural in many of the strips, and ghosts often make appearances. The following strip, another featuring the rivalry between Lo and Mr Chiu, invokes voodoo, and Mr Chiu gets his comeuppance in a most bizarre fashion.

Another common theme is the ridiculing of locals who have embraced Western fashions: long hair, flared trousers, floral shirts, etc. The prejudices of the artist are clear in such cases, because when such figures do appear, their faces are always ugly, one might say almost simian. The following strip, featuring just such a figure, also illustrates the undue deference shown by many locals towards gweilos in the 1960s and 1970s, which has still not disappeared completely seventeen years after the handover of sovereignty.

While many strips highlight longstanding concerns in Hong Kong, others have become dated. The following strip, for example, reflects the prevailing atmosphere in a typical Chinese restaurant thirty years ago, when dim sum were usually wheeled around in large steaming trolleys, and the person pushing the trolley shouted out its contents. And securing a table was a difficult task in which the restaurant chose not to get involved.

Most of the strips have no writing, so they can be appreciated without any knowledge of Chinese. I must confess that I don’t find these cartoons particularly funny, but Lo Fu-ji, who is certainly no gentleman, provides a good insight into a uniquely Chinese sense of humour, which I still don’t understand fully after more than forty years.

silly song titles

I don’t listen to modern pop music, so I don’t know if the trend has continued, but in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was quite common for songs to have titles that were completely meaningless. Here is what I came up with after a few moments of thought:

• Be-Bop-A-Lula by Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps (1956)
• Rama Lama Ding Dong by the Edsels (1958)
• Papa Oom Mow Mow by the Rivingtons (1962)
• Da Doo Ron Ron by the Crystals (1963)
• Doo Wah Diddy Diddy by the Exciters (1963)
• Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um by Major Lance (1963)
• Ring Dang Doo by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (1965)
• Sha La La La Lee by the Small Faces (1966)
• Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by the Beatles (1968)
• In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly (1968)
• Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road (1971)

And if you think that these titles are silly, then I must warn you that things are about to become a lot sillier. One of my favourite radio programs is the self-styled ‘antidote to panel games’, BBC Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, which has been running since 1972. An idea of the anarchic humour of this program can be gleaned from the program announcer’s closing credits, which suggests that the panellists ‘were given silly things to do’.

These include singing one song to the tune of another (e.g., Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling to the tune of Charles Aznavour’s She); Uxbridge English Dictionary, in which the panellists are asked to suggest new definitions for old words (e.g., randomize—a squint); and a series of games in which the teams are asked to suggest books, songs or movies that would appeal to a specific social group, such as accountants or farmers.

In the spirit of the last game, I would like to suggest a few ‘well-known’ songs that might appeal to an audience of fish:

• Shark, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Tuna (1954)
• Theme for a Bream by Cliff Pilchard (1961)
• Twist and Trout by the Isley Brothers (1961)
• Cod Only Knows by the Beach Boys (1966)
• A Plaice in the Sun by Stevie Wonder (1967)
• Mullet of Kintyre by Wings (1977)
• Sprat Trap by the Boomtown Sprats (1978)

For an older audience, possible contributions might include Heart and Sole by Hoagy Carmichael and Salmon Chanted Evening by Rodgers and Hammerstein. However, I’ve not suggested Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, which is a genuine title, or anything by Country Joe and the Fish, which was a real band.

I accept full responsibility for the awfulness of these examples, although you should bear in mind the origins of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, which featured two of the later show’s regular panellists and John ‘Otto’ Cleese, later a stalwart of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, was a 1960s BBC radio comedy whose stock-in-trade was the excruciatingly dreadful pun—you often heard the studio audience groaning in unison as yet another was delivered.

With this in mind, can you suggest other ‘fishy’ song titles? All your contributions will be published, regardless of how awful and contrived they are. The possibility that they are even more terrible than mine is fairly remote.

peculiar pronouncements

You say eether and I say eyether,
You say neether and I say nyther,
Eether, eyether, neether, nyther,
Let’s call the whole thing off!

Ira Gershwin, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, from Shall We Dance, 1937.

The catalyst for this post was the BBC’s reporting of the conflict in Syria, in particular reports of the bombardment of the city of Homs by government forces. It is of merely incidental concern that there has been no consensus on how this beleaguered city’s name should be pronounced, but it does point to a general malaise within the BBC that was not present thirty years ago, when a newsreader, faced with an unfamiliar place name, was expected to consult the corporation’s Pronunciation Unit for guidance before broadcasting.

Whether this unit still exists I have no idea, although it does seem like the kind of outfit whose services might be dispensed with if the BBC is required to cut its costs. Certainly, the variety of pronunciations heard on the BBC nowadays suggest that it is no longer in business, and individuals are thus left to make their own decisions.

So what is the correct pronunciation of ‘Homs’? I have no idea, although I can make an informed guess. However, it should be noted that ‘correct’ in this context does not have an objective meaning, and in using the word I am merely reflecting the way in which residents of the city might refer to it. With this in mind, I have noticed that the majority of reporters and newsreaders say ‘Homz’; very few refer to the city as ‘Homss’, which I believe to be the ‘correct’ pronunciation.

There are two pieces of evidence for this view. First, I cannot think of a single English word in which a voiced consonant is followed by an unvoiced sibilant (‘-ss-’), so it is natural for a native English speaker to voice the sibilant in any unfamiliar word (we say ‘bedz’ and ‘dogz’, for example, not bedss’ and ‘dogss’). Second, most Muslims pronounce words like ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ with the sibilant unvoiced, so I deduce that they would do the same with ‘Homs’, although a counter-argument here might be that in ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ the sibilant follows a vowel, and therefore the analogy is not valid.

There are times when I wonder whether there is a conspiracy not to agree on a specific pronunciation, because some words may be pronounced in three or four different ways. When the existence of al-Qaeda first registered with the general public, after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, President Bush pronounced ‘al-Qaeda’ to rhyme with ‘raider’. Later, a pronunciation that rhymed ‘al-Qaeda’ with ‘rider’ became popular, and hapless former British Home Secretary John Reid muddied the waters by rhyming it with ‘reader’. There has always been the odd journalist or newsreader who eschewed all three of these options and instead pronounced the two internal vowels of ‘al-Qaeda’ separately. I suspect that this is closest to how it should be pronounced, and that the other three versions are the result of the natural tendency of English speakers to seek to pronounce two adjacent vowels as a single vowel or diphthong.

That English speakers might have trouble pronouncing Arabic names is predictable, but you wouldn’t expect those same speakers to have problems with their own place names. Even Americans know that Gloucester, Leicester and Worcester are not pronounced the way they read, but there are hundreds of English villages that also retain their mediæval spellings but have acquired a modern pronunciation. If you think that you can work out that modern pronunciation from the name, I invite you to try the following quiz, the source for which is a booklet produced by the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1936: Broadcast English II: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of Some English Place-Names.

It may seem that this exercise is already out of date, but the trend is clearly towards a simplification of pronunciation, and long names will inevitably be shortened, usually by elision of their middle syllables. For example, the village of Faldingworth in Lincolnshire was pronounced as it read in 1936, but by now it may well be most commonly rendered as ‘Falworth’, or something similar. With these caveats in mind, how do you pronounce the following place names?

 1. Almondbury (a village in Yorkshire).
 2. Barugh (a village in Yorkshire).
 3. Brougham (a village in Cumbria).
 4. Caldmore (a village in Staffordshire).
 5. Cholmondeley (a village in Cheshire).
 6. Cholmondeston (a village in Cheshire).
 7. Congresbury (a village in Somerset).
 8. Happisburgh (a village in Norfolk).
 9. Hardenhuish (a village in Wiltshire).
10. Puncknowle (a village in Somerset).
11. Trowse (a village in Norfolk).
12. Wyrardisbury (a village in Buckinghamshire).

To give some indication of how difficult this is, Garboldisham in Norfolk is pronounced ‘Gaarblshəm’ (where ‘ə’ is the indeterminate, unstressed vowel heard in the second syllable of ‘often’), while Maugersbury in Gloucestershire is pronounced ‘Mawzbəry’. There are also regional variants to consider: the initial letter of Gillingham in Kent is pronounced as in ‘Jack and Jill’, while the same letter in the Gillinghams in Dorset and Norfolk is pronounced like the gills of fish; the Houghton in Hampshire is pronounced ‘Hotən’, the Houghton in Lancashire is rendered as ‘Hawtən’, and the Houghton in Norfolk is known locally as ‘Howtən’.

Local pronunciation is clearly the guiding principle of the BBC’s booklet, mainly because it is unlikely that anyone living more than 50 miles away from the place in question will have heard of it. Newcomers to a town or village are unlikely to listen carefully to what the locals call their new home, so they make up their own versions. My own home town (Penrith, in Cumbria) ought to pose no problems with regard to pronunciation, but locals pronounce it with the stress on the first syllable, and newcomers invariably place the stress on the second syllable, especially if they came originally from the south of England.

If you want to know how well you have done, the ‘correct’ pronunciations are listed in a comment below. When I’ve tried similar quizzes in the past, even natives of England struggled to get more than three or four correct, so this quiz is really for amusement rather than a genuine attempt to assess your knowledge.

bbc english #5: explaining science

Like many websites that contain frequently updated information, the BBC News website includes a list of the ten ‘most read’ stories. When I logged on to the site a couple of days ago, I noted that the tag line for the top story was ‘Electric image of single molecule’. It is encouraging to see that reports about cutting-edge science are widely read, although I do wonder how many readers know enough about the science behind a given story to be able to critique that story.

I would concede immediately that science journalism is more difficult than most other types of journalism, because simplifying a story for a general audience risks changing it in a fundamental way, while nothing essential is lost in reporting the devious dealings of modern financiers if a credit default swap is described as ‘an insurance policy’. However, it is in the nature of science that the language used for its description should be precise. The tag line noted above is a poor start (what is an ‘electric image’?), although the article title—‘Single molecule’s electric charges seen in first image’—conveys more information. But one crucial word is missing: ‘distribution’ (more on this in a moment).

The text of the story itself is in need of some critical corrections. For example, take the following sentence:

The work comes from a group at IBM Research Zurich that specialises in examining the world at the infinitesimal scale of atoms and molecules.

I’m bound to ask whether the anonymous journalist responsible for this piece has any idea what ‘infinitesimal’ actually means. It certainly does not mean ‘extremely small’, which is a fair description of atoms and molecules. In fact, ‘infinitesimal’ has a precise mathematical meaning, which can be explained as follows: take a number (1 is as good as any) and divide by two. Repeat this operation an infinite number of times. The result will be an infinitesimal value, not quite zero but unquantifiably close to zero.

The molecule in question, naphthalocyanine, has an approximately X-shaped structure in which the arms of the X are naphthalene molecules attached to a central hub or ring of nitrogen atoms. The scientific breakthrough being described is the ability to produce an image that shows the electronic charge distribution across the molecule:

As the charged tip encounters charges within the naphthalocyanine, the cantilever begins wagging in a way that shows up precisely where the electrons are.

Unfortunately, the image does not show ‘precisely where the electrons are’, because such precision is not possible. What the image actually shows is a probability function, a sum of all the possible positions of all the electrons in the molecule.

Finally, the author adds a few words to reflect on possible future applications of this new imaging technique:

In combination with more established techniques, the approach will shed light on the nanoscale world that is promising not only for fundamental science, but also for future applications in which electric behaviour at such scales will be exploited.

Although the second comma serves no purpose, the offending word here is ‘nanoscale’. For reasons that are not obvious, the prefix ‘nano–’ appears to have become established as a way of indicating that something is very small, in the same way that ‘mega–’ is now widely used for anything that is larger than the ordinary. However, like ‘infinitesimal’ above, both ‘nano–’ and ‘mega–’ have precise meanings, in this case as defined in the modern version of the metric system, from which both prefixes have been borrowed. Thus a nanometre is precisely 1/1,000,000,000th of a metre, which I think everyone will agree is an extremely short distance. However, molecules typically have diameters that are even smaller, between 60 and 600 picometres (a picometre is 1/1,000,000,000,000th of a metre), so we should really be talking about the picoscale here. And if we are discussing atomic nuclei, then 2–20 femtometres (add another three zeroes to the divisor) is a typical diameter, so nuclear reactions (fission, fusion) can be said to take place at the femtoscale.

Despite the inaccuracy, I suspect that we are now stuck with both ‘nano–’ and ‘mega–’, because both have escaped from their original scientific usage into general circulation. I wonder whether this reflects a decline in the standard of education in science or English, or both, or whether I’m merely being over-sensitive to modern trends in language usage.

other posts in this series
BBC English.
Grand Slam.
More or Less.
Making an Impression.

bbc english #4: making an impression

It’s official. The BBC is now employing kindergarten pupils to write up its ‘soft’ news stories. I am, of course, being facetious, although I do question how the author of the latest badly written article on the BBC website came to be employed by the corporation in the first place. The subject matter is interesting enough—the artist-in-residence for London’s Olympic Delivery Authority has produced a photograph that mirrors a well-known painting by the nineteenth-century French artist Georges Seurat, his Bathers at Asnières—but the quality of the writing is extremely poor. The following sentence is probably the worst:

Georges Seurat’s famous painting, which is housed in London’s National Gallery, is a famous 19th Century impressionist masterpiece.

Seurat, Bathers at Asnières [National Gallery, London].

There are six points that I would make about this sentence. The first, and most obvious, is the redundancy: we don’t need to be told twice that the painting is famous. In fact, we probably shouldn’t be told once, because it is highly questionable whether this painting is famous, if we define ‘famous’ as being recognizable by someone with no knowledge of art or art history. By this definition, there is only one painting that can unequivocally be described as ‘famous’: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Of course, there are paintings that are well known, at least to a local audience, such as Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire or Constable’s The Hay Wain, both of which also hang in the National Gallery and which, as prints, are often found adorning English living room walls. In a poll of listeners to Radio 4’s Today program in 2005 to find the ‘greatest’ painting hanging in a British gallery, these paintings came first and second, respectively, which perhaps reflects nationalistic values, or a sense of relief that England has produced the occasional world-class artist. Seurat’s Bathers came nowhere.

Turner, The Fighting Temeraire [National Gallery, London].

Constable, The Hay Wain [National Gallery, London].

My next three points relate to the compound modifier ‘19th Century’: (1) while there is no sense in which it is incorrect, stylistically ‘19th’ is more appropriate to a text message than to a journalistic article (I would spell it out); (2) the hyphen seems almost to have disappeared from low-level English writing, which I attribute to ignorance of its value, given that in this case it would serve to distinguish the adjectival use in this example from the (unhyphenated) noun phrase; (3) although there are established rules for when to use an initial capital, such as to begin a sentence, for abbreviations, and for the initial letters of people’s and countries’ names, I discovered as a book editor that there was a huge grey area where people appeared to be making up their own rules based on what they considered important. However, there is no justification for capitalizing ‘century’, which is merely a designated period of one hundred years and is in no sense what used to be called a ‘proper’ noun.

Then there is the labelling of Bathers as ‘impressionist’. It is true that, like many of the impressionist works being produced around the same time, this painting was rejected by the jury for the Salon, the annual official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. And it is also the case that Seurat was a founder member of the avant-garde reaction to these rejections, the Société des Artistes Indépendants, but Seurat’s painting technique had nothing in common with the bold brushwork and apparently unfinished quality of a typical impressionist painting. On the contrary, he was influenced by quasi-scientific theories of colour perception that were popular at the time, which led him to develop a technique that became known as ‘pointillism’, the painting next to each other of small dots of complementary colours across an entire canvas. It is a technique that requires a considerable amount of meticulous work, and ‘meticulous’ is not an obvious adjective to use when describing impressionism. Perhaps the only quality that Seurat shared with quintessential impressionists such as Cezanne and Monet was that he didn’t paint like Poussin or Delacroix, which was probably the criterion on which rejection for the Salon was based.

Having raised the spectre of errant capitalization above, it is with some hesitation that I pose the following question: should the names of art movements be capitalized, which is done by many writers? I take a generally minimalist line on the subject of initial capitals, but the question is more awkward than it may appear. I have no problems with ‘cubism’ or ‘abstract expressionism’, because it is clear that art movements are being referred to, but what about ‘symbolism’? In addition to being an art movement, it is also an ordinary word. Reluctantly, I would therefore have to concede that initial capitals are required for art movements, which also covers the distinction between the Romantic movement in music and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the altogether more mundane notion of romantic love.

Finally, I challenge the notion that Bathers is a ‘masterpiece’. The mediæval craft guilds of Europe had apprentices, journeymen and masters, and in this context a masterpiece was the piece of work produced by a journeyman to demonstrate that he was ready to graduate to the rank of master. By definition, there was only one masterpiece. Of course, definitions change, but I think it is useful to retain the notion of singularity. And most art critics agree that Seurat’s masterpiece is not Bathers but A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte. However, I’m still not satisfied. After more than a century of modernism in art, no one believes that the human form need be portrayed realistically, but pointillism does not lend itself to a sympathetic rendition. Because the juxtaposition of complementary colours means that those colours are mixed in the eye of the observer rather than by the artist on a palette, the surface of such a painting has a luminosity that can be put to better use. The technique works more effectively in landscape painting. I contend, therefore, that Seurat’s masterpiece, painted in the last year of his life, is Port of Gravelines Channel.

Seurat, Port of Gravelines Channel [Indianpolis Museum of Art].

This painting captures perfectly the hazy light that is so typical of flat coastal regions in temperate latitudes, and what I think is striking is the exquisite rhythms and symmetry of the repeating motifs. And, before I forget, as an editor, this is how I would have altered the original sentence:

Georges Seurat’s painting, which hangs in London’s National Gallery, is a well-known example of nineteenth-century post-Impressionism.

There is a postscript to this story. When I first read the offending sentence, I copied it into a Notepad file for future reference. The following day, I was unable to find a link to the article anywhere on the BBC website, leading me to speculate that it had been pulled by someone who was as appalled as I was about its quality. However, I tracked it down by pasting the sentence into Google. What really surprised me when I ran the search was that this sentence, complete with errors, had also appeared on twenty-five other sites, all of which, presumably, have no system of quality control.

other posts in this series
BBC English.
Grand Slam.
More or Less.
Explaining Science.

bbc english #3: more or less

There are many ‘rules’ governing the ‘correct’ use of English that seem unnecessarily fussy and serve no useful purpose. The prohibition on splitting infinitives is a good example. In fact, this so-called ‘rule’ was the invention of nineteenth-century pedants, and there are no good grounds for its continued survival, especially now that it has been effectively torpedoed by the statement of the five-year mission of the U.S.S. Enterprise at the beginning of each episode of Star Trek:

…to boldly go where no man has gone before.

I always thought that this sounded rather contrived, but not on the grounds that the infinitive ‘to go’ was being wantonly split. I would have moved the adverb ‘boldly’ so that it preceded the adverbial clause that is the meat of the statement:

…to go boldly where no man has gone before.

Notice that there is no change in meaning, but there is a subtle change of emphasis, so which version you prefer is not a matter of correctness, merely a pointer to what you consider is important in the statement.

At first glance, the distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, that ‘less’ should be used for uncountable nouns and ‘fewer’ for countable nouns, would seem to fall into the same category. After all, you may offend a few pedants if you get it ‘wrong’, but the meaning is unaffected. If this is your assessment, then you may want to consider the following sentence, which I encountered on the BBC Sport website earlier this month:

Does the trend for less positive tests during competition reflect how sport is getting cleaner?

By using ‘less’ instead of ‘fewer’, the corporation’s sports editor, who committed this howler in a discussion on drug tests at the 2012 Olympic Games, ended up modifying ‘positive’ instead of ‘tests’. The problem is that ‘less’ can be used in other contexts, and the sentence is ambiguous because ‘less positive’ is automatically read as not quite as positive as previously thought. The ambiguity could have been avoided by following the rule:

Does the trend for fewer positive tests during competition reflect how sport is getting cleaner?

‘Fewer’ cannot modify an adjective, only the noun ‘tests’, so the intended meaning is clear. The moral, which BBC journalists seem to have forgotten, is that if you break a rule, you should be aware that you have done so and of the possible consequences for your message.

other posts in this series
BBC English.
Grand Slam.
Making an Impression.
Explaining Science.

bbc english #2: grand slam

In his landmark essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell argued that people who misuse metaphors rarely have a mental image of the thing they are attempting to describe, because if they did have such an image, they wouldn’t misuse the metaphor in the first place. Although the essay is concerned primarily with the use of worn-out metaphors and turns of phrase, he did point out that the purpose of using a metaphor in the first place is to provide an image that enables the reader or listener to grasp the point being made more easily.

One of the examples he used was the phrase ‘to toe the line’, meaning to conform, to avoid stepping beyond accepted norms and conventions. He pointed out that it was often written ‘to tow the line’, which is possible, given that ‘line’ is a synonym for ‘rope’, which can be towed, but the perverted version sows confusion rather than providing clarity.

The latest specimen of careless usage from BBC journalists is not quite so blatant, but it is clear that those who use it are not thinking about what they are saying. Sports fans will be aware that the Australian Open tennis championship started this week. It is being billed as the season’s ‘first grand slam’. In contract bridge, a grand slam is a commitment in advance to take all thirteen tricks, so I think that it is reasonable to assume that a grand slam in tennis would be winning this championship, plus the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open, preferably in the same year, these being the four major championships in tennis. This feat may be impossible in the modern era, given the small differences in skill between the top players; nevertheless, it is ludicrous to describe individual championships as ‘grand slams’. Each of the four should be described as ‘a grand slam event’, although perhaps tennis, and tennis commentators, would do better to copy golf and refer to the four national championships mentioned as ‘the four majors’ and thus avoid the hyperbole.

other posts in this series
BBC English.
More or Less.
Making an Impression.
Explaining Science.

bbc english

Do you shout at the television set? I certainly do. Almost the only programs I watch nowadays are the news bulletins, so you might guess that I’m upset about the bias being shown. The BBC is frequently accused of bias, but this isn’t what annoys me. Bias, if it exists, is easily seen through. My gorge rises in response to sloppy, imprecise use of language, which is all but ubiquitous in the modern era.

‘BBC English’ used to be touted as an exemplar of how my native language should be spoken, but if it still is then something is seriously wrong. The BBC is as guilty of shoddy use of language as every other media outlet providing news coverage. The standard of its journalism has slipped alarmingly in the last two decades, which probably reflects the abandonment of the teaching of English grammar in the UK that began with the introduction of ‘comprehensive’ education in the 1960s (for non-British readers, ‘comprehensive’ here refers to the heterogeneity of a school’s student population, not to the breadth of the curriculum).

The item that caught my attention on the BBC World News last night was not an especially egregious example of this trend, but it is entirely typical of the state of play. According to the newsreader, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist had been killed by a ‘car bomb’ in Tehran. This sounds reasonable enough, and you may be wondering why I took exception to it. However, a car bomb is a car used as a bomb, while the unfortunate nuclear scientist was actually killed by a bomb attached to his car. To compound the error, the newsreader continued by stating that the bomb had been attached to the underside of the car. This part of the report was voiced over footage of the scientist’s car, the top of which was covered by a blue tarpaulin. The underside of the car was clearly undamaged, but despite the tarpaulin it was possible to see that the passenger cabin had been severely damaged. The bomb was in fact a high-tech magnetic device attached to the side of the car.

The error was repeated this morning on the BBC News website:

The US condemns the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan in a car bomb attack in north Tehran.

Is this pedantry? I think not. It is merely my reasonable expectation that when someone speaks, or writes, they set out their thoughts in a clear, precise and unambiguous manner. Pedantry is insisting that a word like ‘agenda’ is plural (technically it is, but it would be pedantic to labour the point).

Because, as I outlined above, the BBC’s use of English is now so lamentably poor, I propose to highlight particularly egregious examples from time to time. In fact, I’ve just found myself guilty of what I accuse the BBC of doing: its use of English is not merely poor, as I’ve suggested; it’s a-bomb-inable.

other posts in this series
Grand Slam.
More or Less.
Making an Impression.
Explaining Science.

broadcast news

In the late 1970s, I attended an interview for a post with the BBC’s Far East and Latin American Service, during which I raised the question of bias in broadcast news reporting.

“Surely you don’t think that BBC News is biased?” I was asked.

This is a paraphrase of my reply: “The BBC World Service provides a nine-minute news bulletin every hour. If we exclude the time allocated to opening and closing headlines, that leaves less than eight minutes to tell listeners what is happening in the world. Someone is therefore deciding which news items to leave out. This may not be conscious bias, but that someone is making a value judgement about what is and isn’t important, a judgement that listeners may not agree with if they had access to all the information that the news editor has available.”

I didn’t get the job. However, I was reminded of this episode while watching the TV news yesterday morning, specifically how two different news organizations tackled the same story, the unrest in Cairo. At 7am, BBC News America led with the corporation’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen’s extended report. Then, at 7.30am, NBC’s Nightly News included an equally detailed dispatch by its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel.

The two reports were broadly similar, but there was one critical difference: what the two reporters had to say about the empty tear gas canisters that they were shown by demonstrators. Bowen reported that the demonstrators were pointing out that the canisters bore the legend ‘made in USA’, while Engel merely said that he was shown the canisters as evidence of the brutality of the police repression. So why the difference?

There are plenty of people who will immediately cite Bowen’s report as evidence of the BBC’s anti-American bias, even though it is unlikely to be untrue. After all, America sells huge quantities of weaponry to Egypt’s military, and it is a stretch of the audience’s credulity to suggest that this doesn’t include tear gas. The more intriguing question is why Engel didn’t mention it.

Any answer would necessarily be speculative, although it is easy to imagine any number of possible reasons. However, speculation is best left to speculators, and the only firm conclusion that I can draw is that anyone who wants to know what is really going on in the world would be well advised to consult as many sources as possible, both those that reinforce their prejudices and those that challenge them, whether it is a simple determination of fact or whether what is presented as fact is actually a value judgement.

we are reliably informed

It is said that we live in the information age. Unfortunately, we’re not vouchsafed any guarantees as to the veracity or accuracy of the information on offer. And, paraphrasing C. Northcote Parkinson, to make matters worse, information increases in volume to fill the means available for its transmission. It has always been so.

All forms of primitive communication over distance, from the bullroarer, known throughout the world, to African drums and Native American smoke signals, have one thing in common: lack of bandwidth. This means that any message that is to be transmitted must be both simple and important. Clearly, there is no point in a message being capable of more than one interpretation, so there is no room for subtlety, and complex messages are impossible. Everything must be direct and to the point. I leave the question of who adjudicates in matters of importance for the moment.

Now look what happens with the invention of the electric telegraph. First, it becomes possible, thanks to Morse code, to transmit messages that are precise in meaning; second, there is a huge increase in the speed and range of transmission. And both greater precision and faster transmission mean that more messages can be sent in a given time. It is inevitable that some messages will be less important than others, and as the technology spreads, it also becomes inevitable that some messages aren’t important at all, whatever criteria you choose to adopt.

As new means of message transmission have come on stream, the trend towards unimportance and/or irrelevance in messages has intensified exponentially and has now reached the point where it has become almost impossible to avoid being swamped by what can only be described as ‘noise’. Only a very small proportion of the messages being transmitted in the modern era have content that is useful.

What I will call the information pyramid succinctly describes the current state of play. At the base are the billions of messages that are ephemeral, irrelevant or simply pointless. The messages posted on social networking sites and published in celebrity gossip columns fall unequivocally into this category. The next step in the hierarchy can be described as ‘information’ and has this characteristic: that it is useful beyond mere amusement or titillation. However, if that information is used only once before being allowed to sink back into the background noise, then its potential may be wasted.

On the other hand, translating this information into ‘knowledge’ requires a level of intellectual engagement that has become ever more difficult to sustain in the modern climate of triviality and superficial discourse. It also requires the ability to discriminate between the merely useful and the genuinely important.

Attaining the apex of the pyramid, which can be described as ‘wisdom’, is a lonely endeavour that few will attempt and that requires a superhuman effort. And, in a bizarre reversal of definitions, the attainment of such wisdom is likely to be seen by those who cannot distinguish between noise and information as pointless and irrelevant. Unfortunately, wisdom is always denigrated by people who do not or cannot understand it. Clever people are invariably viewed with suspicion.

game of death

One of the more interesting minor news items of the past few days—so interesting that I felt it necessary to ignore my own illness in order to comment—concerns a French TV documentary, Game of Death, which was aired recently on a major terrestrial channel in France. The program used eighty participants, each of whom thought they were taking part in a pilot for a new game show. It was filmed in front of an audience.

Each contestant, in turn, was led out before the audience and told that their role in what was to follow was to administer an electric shock to a man in an adjacent cubicle, whom they believed to be a fellow contestant and whom they could hear but not see, every time he gave a wrong answer to a question, the voltage being increased each time. The truly horrifying part of this story is that only 20 percent of the participants refused to continue before a potentially lethal final shock was administered.

What none of the participants knew was that there was no electric shock, and the man in the cubicle was an actor whose job it was to scream in pain as and when required. I have no wish to condemn those participants who were prepared to torture, even kill, another human being whom they did not know, especially as they were under pressure from a glamorous presenter, a man in a white coat (the universal code, even in porn movies, for a ‘scientist’), a studio audience baying for blood, and dramatic background music.

In fact, I can afford to be a little smug here. When an advance trailer for this item appeared on BBC World News, our TV had been set to ‘mute’ and all we saw were images of a slider being pushed up to maximum and a man writhing in agony. I was immediately reminded of the experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1961–62, purportedly to investigate how ordinary people can become mass murderers. The trial, in Jerusalem, of Adolf Eichmann had begun three months before the first experiments and probably inspired them, but in addition the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in occupied Poland during the Second World War were just beginning to be more widely known; nevertheless, only professional historians and book editors are likely to be aware of that story, and only students of psychology (and book editors) are likely to be aware of the experiments, so any smugness on my part is simply not justified.

There are several points to be made here: first, in Milgram’s experiments, only 65 percent of participants went ‘all the way’; the higher figure in the TV program is likely to have been influenced by peer pressure and the widespread infatuation among the public with so-called ‘reality’ television and celebrity.

Second, no university ethics committee would countenance this type of experiment nowadays, because there can be no guarantee that participants will not be traumatized by their experience. Milgram’s experiments were controversial at the time for precisely this reason. Unfortunately, TV companies are not constrained by such niceties; viewer figures are the only yardstick of success. And it is almost certain that some participants in the bogus game show will have continuing psychological problems as a result of their experiences.

Third, in both cases the experiments established that people can behave in appallingly inhumane ways given the right circumstances, but this was already known, and the much more important question of why people do behave in this way remains unanswered.

Finally, it should be noted that extreme public humiliation is a key ingredient in all successful reality shows, whether it be The Apprentice, Big Brother, America’s Next Top Model, Survivor or countless others. It is what the audience expects. And what participants are more than happy to endure in the pathetic belief that they will become ‘famous’. Personally, I find it all not just depressing but actually disgusting: prurient interest provided for and regarded as somehow important. Nothing could induce me to watch a single episode of any reality show, and I’ve never even heard any of the winners of The X Factor, Pop Idol or American Idol. I have much better things to do. And I certainly don’t take kindly to crude efforts to manipulate my emotions by pernicious nonsense that belongs in the garbage.

drug of choice?

Television is a malevolent influence. This statement ought to be self-evident, but, especially in Hong Kong, most people would deny it, almost as an article of faith. It is a curious fact that television is widely considered to be a positive influence. Appealing to the heavy weight of Chinese tradition, which it is perilous to attack, proponents claim that it brings families closer together.

This is palpably untrue. When a family sits down to watch television, they watch television; they may chatter inanely, but they do not communicate. Conversely, when a set is left on as a background filler, it provides sufficient distraction to seriously impair the ability to think. Without thought it is impossible to express feelings, even about fellow family members. What is felt but not expressed is rarely assumed. Far from drawing the family closer together, television drives it apart, each member into their own tiny, self-contained universe.

However, I’m not advocating the abolition of television. Like the atomic bomb, it cannot be uninvented. But we should learn not only to live with but also to use constructively the demon that has become such an inextricable part of all our lives. This we have so far failed to do.

On the contrary, we have allowed the television set to become an instrument of control, because we have not stopped to consider what it is, what it does or what it represents. Television is essentially a relentless projector of images, a distorted montage of unreality. It is constrained by the dimension of time, always moving forward beyond hope of recall. Even the development of video recorders permits no more than a measure of control over the composition of that montage; such devices do not provide a closer approach to reality. How many viewers ever stop to consider that the images they are being shown have been selected by an unseen director? And have they ever considered the images that are not shown? Finally, television provides input to only two of our five senses, one the all-powerful sense of sight, which has the capacity to delude even the most conscientious observer. Bearing in mind that millions of people rely on television, and many form a world view based on what they see, this cannot be a good thing.

But the real danger, and the tragedy, of television is that it is addictive. It is as debilitating as any drug, robbing the viewer/user of the power of discrimination. And the tragedy is that this quality has led to its prime use in modern society: as a means of capturing, and holding, a mass audience, who are then easy prey for advertisers and their subtle or, more frequently, heavy-handed blandishments. This too is probably inevitable, but it does create the quite reasonable expectation that those who have the opportunity to engage in television broadcasting show some degree of responsibility. This seems to be lacking in Hong Kong.

In a few places, television broadcasting has been established and subsequently funded by a licence fee on all sets—an attractive idea, but much too close to being thought a form of taxation to be acceptable in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, what does seem to be acceptable in Hong Kong is broadcasting with the sole purpose of making as much money as possible. Television stations provide as cheap—and as shoddy—a service as they believe they can get away with.

This is precisely what has happened; existing provision is woefully inadequate. If the two terrestrial stations had approximately equal shares of the audience, things could be different, but in Hong Kong we have the odd phenomenon of one station being so completely dominant that it can fill our screens night after night with mindless garbage with no perceptible adverse reaction from its audience. The minority channel can be as adventurous as it likes; in practice, it will make no difference. This is odd because in practice the output of the two stations is broadly similar, so the only plausible explanation for the imbalance is a kind of brand loyalty, which effectively reduces broadcasting to the level of selling soap powder and clearly demonstrates how advanced the narcotic process has become.

The mention of advertising calls to mind yet another danger: the influence that advertisers have, directly or indirectly, on what is and what isn’t broadcast. If an advertiser’s instinct is always to stick with a familiar formula, then programs that are experimental, adventurous or controversial will never see the light of day, unless, that is, a significant audience segment is no longer prepared to watch the mind-numbing drivel that passes for the proven formula.

This is more difficult. Complaining about the quality of television programming is a perennial pastime, but one in which the logical next step is never taken. Not only should we be prepared to boycott a station that refuses to upgrade its programming, we should also be prepared to take the same action against companies and their products that associate themselves with especially bad programs—or with insulting adverts, for that matter. Unfortunately, what constitutes a bad program is an endlessly debatable question and one impossible to answer objectively.

Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps, given the tedium, the drudgery, the sheer ordinariness of everyday life, we need our daily fix, like any other addict. Perhaps we actually like television. Perhaps we might be permitted our harmless little daydreams.

And then you wake up. A little-known fact about Victor Lustig, the man who famously sold the Eiffel Tower, is that he attempted to sell it a second time, because the first victim was too embarrassed to admit that he’d been done up like a kipper. A similar principle underlies the perpetration of every successful fraud.