Although we have Lynne Truss's fantastic homage to the humble apostrophe, someone should perhaps write at a simple introduction to the pronunciation of the English alphabet.
But surely, we all know that "a" on its own is pronounced "ay". But what about the letter "h"? As far a junior school teacher in rural Derbyshire in concerned, the pronunciation is "haytch". Au contraire Ms Illiterate! The correct pronunciation, as verified by the Oxford English Dictionary, is actually: "aitch".
But does this matter (and should I be starting a sentence with "but")? Yes, it does matter because this is part of the foundation for our rich, expressive and diverse language. Get the sound of our letters wrong and its all down hill.
Many would disagree that such pendantic issues, including issues of grammer, should be ignored and go as far as to suggest that we should opt for a more intuitive approach to language. Some would prefer to use a phonetic approach where all our historic customs and grammar rules go out of the window with basic spelling.
The sad reality about this true story is that if our teachers are getting it wrong, what hope for those now at school? Dumbing-down may not be an actual policy for our leading and learned educationalists (the experts) but it is certainly one of the outcomes.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Friday, June 30, 2006
Scotland the Brave
The recent outbreak of Scottish nationalism, where First Minister Jack McConnell refused to support England in the World Cup, has been followed by rising tennis star Andy Murray.
Whilst McConnell was unrepentent in his decision to deliberately not support England after his ridiculous statement, Murray's nationalistic streak seemed a bit more sublte: when he appeared on court at Wimbledon he was sporting a white outfit edged with blue and a Cross of St Andrew wristband. Although he hasn't uttered a word, the message is clear: "hands off England I'm not yours, I'm Scotland's!"
With many other sporting events there are often teams from across the kingdom, but for Wimbledon Murray is put under the Great Britain heading. This is something he obviously dislikes, otherwise why wear such a display of nationalism. I don't know of any other tennis player that has done so.
Can anyone imagine if Henman had worn a Cross of St George wristband? No, because he would have been condemned as a Little Englander.
As Murray is now GB's only hope for tennis stardom I'm sure that most English, Welsh and Northern Irish people would fully support him as "one of us". If Scotland was playing in the World Cup, then I would be hoping for them to go as far as they could.
As with all things when it comes to national pride, the English in particular, are left wondering how things will be perceived. Every other country does its own thing and doesn't care who thet upset. Well, from now on I'm not so sure that Murray deserves (or even wants) the support of his erstwhile southern cousins.
Come back Hadrian -- all is forgiven!
Whilst McConnell was unrepentent in his decision to deliberately not support England after his ridiculous statement, Murray's nationalistic streak seemed a bit more sublte: when he appeared on court at Wimbledon he was sporting a white outfit edged with blue and a Cross of St Andrew wristband. Although he hasn't uttered a word, the message is clear: "hands off England I'm not yours, I'm Scotland's!"
With many other sporting events there are often teams from across the kingdom, but for Wimbledon Murray is put under the Great Britain heading. This is something he obviously dislikes, otherwise why wear such a display of nationalism. I don't know of any other tennis player that has done so.
Can anyone imagine if Henman had worn a Cross of St George wristband? No, because he would have been condemned as a Little Englander.
As Murray is now GB's only hope for tennis stardom I'm sure that most English, Welsh and Northern Irish people would fully support him as "one of us". If Scotland was playing in the World Cup, then I would be hoping for them to go as far as they could.
As with all things when it comes to national pride, the English in particular, are left wondering how things will be perceived. Every other country does its own thing and doesn't care who thet upset. Well, from now on I'm not so sure that Murray deserves (or even wants) the support of his erstwhile southern cousins.
Come back Hadrian -- all is forgiven!
Thursday, June 22, 2006
What a lot of hot air
There seems little doubt that we humans, especially in the northern hemisphere, are pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that this is likely to have an impact on our weather systems. The also seems little doubt that changes need to be made to our collective behaviour if we are to prevent the doomsayers' predictions.
The UK alone contributes but a small percentage to overall global CO2 emissions, so on a micro (UK-only) level the political debate on global warming seems quite removed from our everyday lives of getting to and from work or visiting our local supermarket.
On one level the government's message should be taken seriously and that we should all be doing what we can: cycling everywhere, installing solar heating and erecting wind turbines. If you were to spend the £20,000 or so that it would cost for both solar heating and a wind turbine you would struggle to ever see a financial return; that is, if the local planners allowed you to go ahead.
The mixed messages start to emerge when you understand how government finances work and how every government is actually addicted to motor transport, to the point that new railway lines will not be built (or re-opened) if there is a threat to revenues generated by car journeys. Governments aren't actually addicted to cars, it is just the billions raised from the tax on fuel, road tax and from the anticipated road charging schemes.
On the one hand cars are bad and on the other they're rather very good. How does, or how should, the government handle this dilemma?
From a communications perspective it is tricky. You can't go back to a time when we were less dependent on the car, but governments must re-evaluate their financial need for car-generated revenues. As the M1 grinds to a halt at Luton every morning around 7am, there surely has to be more the transport equation than what it would cost the government if none of us were in our cars. The costs of having hundreds of thousands of people sat going nowhere all around the UK costs businesses millions and these are the costs that we should be looking to reduce.
Governments need to put money into real transport alternatives, to re-open the rural branch lines, to promote bus services and to re-engineer the urban landscape so that we can actually use our cars less.
The UK alone contributes but a small percentage to overall global CO2 emissions, so on a micro (UK-only) level the political debate on global warming seems quite removed from our everyday lives of getting to and from work or visiting our local supermarket.
On one level the government's message should be taken seriously and that we should all be doing what we can: cycling everywhere, installing solar heating and erecting wind turbines. If you were to spend the £20,000 or so that it would cost for both solar heating and a wind turbine you would struggle to ever see a financial return; that is, if the local planners allowed you to go ahead.
The mixed messages start to emerge when you understand how government finances work and how every government is actually addicted to motor transport, to the point that new railway lines will not be built (or re-opened) if there is a threat to revenues generated by car journeys. Governments aren't actually addicted to cars, it is just the billions raised from the tax on fuel, road tax and from the anticipated road charging schemes.
On the one hand cars are bad and on the other they're rather very good. How does, or how should, the government handle this dilemma?
From a communications perspective it is tricky. You can't go back to a time when we were less dependent on the car, but governments must re-evaluate their financial need for car-generated revenues. As the M1 grinds to a halt at Luton every morning around 7am, there surely has to be more the transport equation than what it would cost the government if none of us were in our cars. The costs of having hundreds of thousands of people sat going nowhere all around the UK costs businesses millions and these are the costs that we should be looking to reduce.
Governments need to put money into real transport alternatives, to re-open the rural branch lines, to promote bus services and to re-engineer the urban landscape so that we can actually use our cars less.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Do I look fat in this?
On returning from a recent 2-day pampering session at a local health spa, my wife dropped a clutch of glossy magazines on the coffee table. Heat, OK! and Hello to name but a few. On the cover of one there was a headline-grabbing: “Celebrities’ flabby bellies”.
Of course, such headlines are designed to convert the browser into a purchaser; in my case not actually buying, but it did attract my attention and soon I was flicking through the magazine in that nonchalant not-really-reading-but-of-course-really-reading manner.
A few pages in and there was a feature on the girl band Girls Aloud. On the double-page spread there were ‘now’ and ‘then’ photographs of each band member.
Accompanying each photograph was each singer’s vital statistics. In this case the ‘vital’ element of the figures was that they had all dropped down several clothes sizes. The naturally curvy had become almost skeletal; the healthy facial glow now gaunt.
Whilst it’s easy to dismiss such articles as trivial and irrelevant there is a worrying message being sent out. If this article was a one-off, isolated feature then there would be no problem. But taken together with virtually every other women’s and girl’s title promoting, selling and reinforcing the message that thin is good then we’re going to see a continual increase in eating disorders.
In the same title, ironically, there was an article on how thin and ill Anna Kournikova was looking since she’d left tennis to take up modelling.
Little wonder she’s lost weight: it’s the advertising and fashion industry that eschews any figure that’s larger than an 8 and demands a constant flow of young thin girls to glamorise their products. I wonder how many Flakes Cadbury’s would have sold if they used even an average-sized British women let alone anyone that was slightly overweight.
Companies promoting their products and services must start to look at how their advertising is likely to impact on their target consumers. We must see the use of more everyday-sized models so that young impressionable girls and boys don't get the wrong message that skeletal is good.
Such aspects of companies' activities must also be a fundamental part of their corporate responsibility policies. It is all very well making a commitment to the environment, but if they're promoting thin=good/fat=bad messages then they're simply fuelling eating disorders and their responsibility statements are then no more than spin.
Of course, such headlines are designed to convert the browser into a purchaser; in my case not actually buying, but it did attract my attention and soon I was flicking through the magazine in that nonchalant not-really-reading-but-of-course-really-reading manner.
A few pages in and there was a feature on the girl band Girls Aloud. On the double-page spread there were ‘now’ and ‘then’ photographs of each band member.
Accompanying each photograph was each singer’s vital statistics. In this case the ‘vital’ element of the figures was that they had all dropped down several clothes sizes. The naturally curvy had become almost skeletal; the healthy facial glow now gaunt.
Whilst it’s easy to dismiss such articles as trivial and irrelevant there is a worrying message being sent out. If this article was a one-off, isolated feature then there would be no problem. But taken together with virtually every other women’s and girl’s title promoting, selling and reinforcing the message that thin is good then we’re going to see a continual increase in eating disorders.
In the same title, ironically, there was an article on how thin and ill Anna Kournikova was looking since she’d left tennis to take up modelling.
Little wonder she’s lost weight: it’s the advertising and fashion industry that eschews any figure that’s larger than an 8 and demands a constant flow of young thin girls to glamorise their products. I wonder how many Flakes Cadbury’s would have sold if they used even an average-sized British women let alone anyone that was slightly overweight.
Companies promoting their products and services must start to look at how their advertising is likely to impact on their target consumers. We must see the use of more everyday-sized models so that young impressionable girls and boys don't get the wrong message that skeletal is good.
Such aspects of companies' activities must also be a fundamental part of their corporate responsibility policies. It is all very well making a commitment to the environment, but if they're promoting thin=good/fat=bad messages then they're simply fuelling eating disorders and their responsibility statements are then no more than spin.
How to avoid screen rage
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly new technology becomes a part of everyday working life and the speed that we take technological developments for granted. Recently I was having problems connecting to the internet via our ISDN connection (unfortunately, there are still areas in the UK without broadband) and I was immediately faced with the problem of not being able to send out clients’ urgent press releases.
As I pondered my offline predicament I was transported back to being an 18-year-old junior in a sales office where I used an electric typewriter to produce the letters of the day. It was a slow and laborious process, especially if you made a mistake and had to start again. This sense of tedium enveloped me as I knew that I would have to resort to not an electric typewriter but mail merging letters and printing out the press releases, then stuffing the information into envelopes. It wasn’t that long ago that being able to mass produce letters in the time it would have taken a small army of typists seemed a highly efficient way to work – how quickly times change.
The problem with the ISDN connection was soon resolved and was back online. As I hit the ‘send/receive’ button, I reflected how easy it is to e-mail; I also reflected that a noun has now become a verb. E-mailing is almost as easy as talking and a lot quicker than texting; it is silent, immediate, fast and yet can still come across as being a slightly impersonal medium – probably because everyone thinks that e-mails should be far less formal than letters.
Despite the many benefits that e-mail brings to our lives, it can also be a dangerous tool and one that should be handled with caution. It is too easy to use the ‘reply’ or ‘forward’ options in our e-mail software than it is to send a fresh one. Familiarity does breed contempt and before we know it we’re forwarding a long e-mail chain for all subsequent recipients to read.
If we receive an unpleasant (or even a rather intimate) e-mail we should be very careful how we respond. As Bill Howard, in his article Save Yourself from E-mail Faux Pas, explains: “No matter how annoyed you are at some jerk’s e-mail, save your ‘that’ll put the S.O.B. in his place’ response and look at it again an hour later or first thing the next day. Chances are you’ll want to tone it down.”
Not only may you want to tone the response down, you may not want to end up in court. Unlike telephone calls or sending text messages, with e-mail you are actually publishing material and can be used in a court of law if you are making false accusations are producing inflammatory material. An innocent e-mail to a loved one or a rant about a loathed boss can soon end up half way around the world, leaving the originator of the e-mail embarrassed at best and worst without a job. The same goes for CCs: be careful who you might be unwittingly including in your circulation list.
Getting the message to the right recipient in the first place may not be as easy as you might expect, as Bill Howard suggests: “Use addressee auto-fill cautiously. If you type C-l-a-u, Claudia Andrews appears in the addressee window before Claudia Mezza. Hit enter too soon and you’ll send the message to the wrong Claudia.” However. if you’re generating an e-mail from a database that interfaces with Outlook or Outlook Express then you’re less likely to get the wrong person because you’re creating an e-mail from a unique record and you’d know immediately if you’d opened the wrong record.
With previous technologies there wasn’t the need to be so careful, but with e-mail my advice is that we should observe a few simple rules. Business e-mail should remain for business. Use a Hotmail, or similar server-based e-mail systems, for personal contacts. Where you do receive personal e-mails at work, check the policy of the employer; you might be breaking the terms of your employment (sending personal e-mails is no different from making personal telephone calls) and with spyware able to monitor every keystroke, you don’t know who might be watching.
A few years ago when I working for one particular employer I only found out after sending many e-mails to recruitment agencies that all e-mails (sent and received) were retained on their system, even after deleting them from my own computer.
Whether or not it is company policy I also suggest sending out fresh e-mails every time. This way you can’t accidentally send sensitive information to third party recipients. It may be more time consuming to start with a new e-mail, but this way you’ll avoid falling into the bear traps triggered by lazy habit of hitting the ‘reply’ and ‘forward’ buttons.
Don’t respond immediately to what appears to be an unfriendly or rude e-mail the moment you have read it. If and when you do receive such e-mails, the safety of the anonymity of the screen can lull you into a false sense of security and anger can soon burst forth. Perhaps this should be called screen rage, but whatever it might be called, my advice is walk away and take a breather. Even if the e-mail is unpleasant it is much more positive to deal with it when you are calmer and more focused.
To ensure that you don’t send e-mails that are likely to cause offence avoid sarcasm – it can come across too heavy in e-mail – and irony is often too subtle. The best option is to play it straight.
To get the most out of e-mail we need to apply a few commonsense rules. After all, we know how to behave on the telephone and writing letters so why get careless with e-mail? With e-mail now so much a part of our working life we use it without thought, but as professional communicators we need to be setting the agenda for best practice in all areas of communication and remember that our clients may not be giving the attention they should to such a powerful communications tool.
As I pondered my offline predicament I was transported back to being an 18-year-old junior in a sales office where I used an electric typewriter to produce the letters of the day. It was a slow and laborious process, especially if you made a mistake and had to start again. This sense of tedium enveloped me as I knew that I would have to resort to not an electric typewriter but mail merging letters and printing out the press releases, then stuffing the information into envelopes. It wasn’t that long ago that being able to mass produce letters in the time it would have taken a small army of typists seemed a highly efficient way to work – how quickly times change.
The problem with the ISDN connection was soon resolved and was back online. As I hit the ‘send/receive’ button, I reflected how easy it is to e-mail; I also reflected that a noun has now become a verb. E-mailing is almost as easy as talking and a lot quicker than texting; it is silent, immediate, fast and yet can still come across as being a slightly impersonal medium – probably because everyone thinks that e-mails should be far less formal than letters.
Despite the many benefits that e-mail brings to our lives, it can also be a dangerous tool and one that should be handled with caution. It is too easy to use the ‘reply’ or ‘forward’ options in our e-mail software than it is to send a fresh one. Familiarity does breed contempt and before we know it we’re forwarding a long e-mail chain for all subsequent recipients to read.
If we receive an unpleasant (or even a rather intimate) e-mail we should be very careful how we respond. As Bill Howard, in his article Save Yourself from E-mail Faux Pas, explains: “No matter how annoyed you are at some jerk’s e-mail, save your ‘that’ll put the S.O.B. in his place’ response and look at it again an hour later or first thing the next day. Chances are you’ll want to tone it down.”
Not only may you want to tone the response down, you may not want to end up in court. Unlike telephone calls or sending text messages, with e-mail you are actually publishing material and can be used in a court of law if you are making false accusations are producing inflammatory material. An innocent e-mail to a loved one or a rant about a loathed boss can soon end up half way around the world, leaving the originator of the e-mail embarrassed at best and worst without a job. The same goes for CCs: be careful who you might be unwittingly including in your circulation list.
Getting the message to the right recipient in the first place may not be as easy as you might expect, as Bill Howard suggests: “Use addressee auto-fill cautiously. If you type C-l-a-u, Claudia Andrews appears in the addressee window before Claudia Mezza. Hit enter too soon and you’ll send the message to the wrong Claudia.” However. if you’re generating an e-mail from a database that interfaces with Outlook or Outlook Express then you’re less likely to get the wrong person because you’re creating an e-mail from a unique record and you’d know immediately if you’d opened the wrong record.
With previous technologies there wasn’t the need to be so careful, but with e-mail my advice is that we should observe a few simple rules. Business e-mail should remain for business. Use a Hotmail, or similar server-based e-mail systems, for personal contacts. Where you do receive personal e-mails at work, check the policy of the employer; you might be breaking the terms of your employment (sending personal e-mails is no different from making personal telephone calls) and with spyware able to monitor every keystroke, you don’t know who might be watching.
A few years ago when I working for one particular employer I only found out after sending many e-mails to recruitment agencies that all e-mails (sent and received) were retained on their system, even after deleting them from my own computer.
Whether or not it is company policy I also suggest sending out fresh e-mails every time. This way you can’t accidentally send sensitive information to third party recipients. It may be more time consuming to start with a new e-mail, but this way you’ll avoid falling into the bear traps triggered by lazy habit of hitting the ‘reply’ and ‘forward’ buttons.
Don’t respond immediately to what appears to be an unfriendly or rude e-mail the moment you have read it. If and when you do receive such e-mails, the safety of the anonymity of the screen can lull you into a false sense of security and anger can soon burst forth. Perhaps this should be called screen rage, but whatever it might be called, my advice is walk away and take a breather. Even if the e-mail is unpleasant it is much more positive to deal with it when you are calmer and more focused.
To ensure that you don’t send e-mails that are likely to cause offence avoid sarcasm – it can come across too heavy in e-mail – and irony is often too subtle. The best option is to play it straight.
To get the most out of e-mail we need to apply a few commonsense rules. After all, we know how to behave on the telephone and writing letters so why get careless with e-mail? With e-mail now so much a part of our working life we use it without thought, but as professional communicators we need to be setting the agenda for best practice in all areas of communication and remember that our clients may not be giving the attention they should to such a powerful communications tool.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Mean-spirited local authorities
Driving our cars today seems to offer fewer and fewer pleasure: we have speed cameras at every turn, we have expensive fuel and we have increasingly congested roads. Even when it comes to parking there always seems to be problems finding a space.
The only consolation, in recent times, was when a fellow motorist offered you their pay-and-display ticket with enough time remaining to enable you to park for free. This simple neighbourly gesture was always enough to put a smile on my face and restored my faith in humanity.
But if you've been to a car park recently you'll find that your attempts at being neighbourly have been thwarted. Increasingly, you now have to enter either all or part of your registration number so that you can't give the ticket to anyone else. Of course I can see the finance directors' rationale: more money for the coffers, but for the actual amount of additional revenue raised set against the additional cost of the more complex machines, it is a mean-spirited act.
Whether or not you visit car parks that have the 'mean machines', as I'll brand them, there is the other issue: the actual cost of parking. I'm not really bothered whether I pay £1 or £2 per hour, what I really object to is the cynical pricing policy. How often have you found a ticket machine where the pricing is something like: 70p for 1 hour; £1.30 for 2-3 hours and £1.80 for 3-4 hours and so on? That's right, every time you visit such a machine you can guarantee that you have 60p in change or pound coins only. Why don't councils opt for round figures? £1 for an hour; £2 for 2 hours and so on.
The reason is obvious and it is another devious ploy to extract maximum revenues from the motorist that is trying to visit the village/town/city centre and spend money in the shops (keeping shops in business and enabling them to pay their local rates back to the mean-spirited councils).
To encourage shoppers back into town and city centres we need parking policies that actually encourage visits and help dissuade us from shopping at the out-of-town centres where parking is free.
What we pay when we park our cars is not going to change the course of history, but councils should wake up to the fact that they should be encouraging visits to town centres, that they shouldn't be preventing neighbourly gestures and they should realise that we're not as stupid as they think.
The only consolation, in recent times, was when a fellow motorist offered you their pay-and-display ticket with enough time remaining to enable you to park for free. This simple neighbourly gesture was always enough to put a smile on my face and restored my faith in humanity.
But if you've been to a car park recently you'll find that your attempts at being neighbourly have been thwarted. Increasingly, you now have to enter either all or part of your registration number so that you can't give the ticket to anyone else. Of course I can see the finance directors' rationale: more money for the coffers, but for the actual amount of additional revenue raised set against the additional cost of the more complex machines, it is a mean-spirited act.
Whether or not you visit car parks that have the 'mean machines', as I'll brand them, there is the other issue: the actual cost of parking. I'm not really bothered whether I pay £1 or £2 per hour, what I really object to is the cynical pricing policy. How often have you found a ticket machine where the pricing is something like: 70p for 1 hour; £1.30 for 2-3 hours and £1.80 for 3-4 hours and so on? That's right, every time you visit such a machine you can guarantee that you have 60p in change or pound coins only. Why don't councils opt for round figures? £1 for an hour; £2 for 2 hours and so on.
The reason is obvious and it is another devious ploy to extract maximum revenues from the motorist that is trying to visit the village/town/city centre and spend money in the shops (keeping shops in business and enabling them to pay their local rates back to the mean-spirited councils).
To encourage shoppers back into town and city centres we need parking policies that actually encourage visits and help dissuade us from shopping at the out-of-town centres where parking is free.
What we pay when we park our cars is not going to change the course of history, but councils should wake up to the fact that they should be encouraging visits to town centres, that they shouldn't be preventing neighbourly gestures and they should realise that we're not as stupid as they think.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)