So on Friday evening, I did just that and I was being clever, checking ways to highlight a whole bunch of photos and download them all at once, when everything went haywire. Goodness knows what combination of keys I pressed but the whole screen turned upside down. I tried the undo key - to no avail. I tried various combinations of key controls - still to no avail. I even turned the damn thing off completely and rebooted, hoping it would go back to a default setting. Still to no avail. I completed my tasks using the upside down screen. How talented am I? And then I switched the thing off and waited until the chess match was over.
It turned out that I had accidentally put the laptop into tablet mode. That laptop is too clever for its own good. You can switch to tablet mode, fold the screen over, ignore the keyboard and use the touchscreen. We NEVER do that. Even Phil had to hunt for instructions to get it back to ordinary laptop mode.
As I said, too clever by half! I shall stick to my iPad! Except that, as the chess tournament comes to an end, I wanted to add a picture of the venue. Here it is:-
I have come across another odd use of English here in Portugal. A furniture shop advertises a service they call “room staging”. What does that mean? It is not a term I have come across in use in England.
The French Académie have been getting a little stressed about their language too. I spent many years as a Modern Foreign Languages teacher explaining to recalcitrant, or possibly just dim, students, that the gender business in French and Spanish has nothing to do with sex. It’s purely a linguistic convention that says that some words are masculine and others feminine. Okay, it’s a little anomalous that you can have 999 women and 1 man in a group and you have to refer to them using a masculine plural pronoun but is it really worth getting worked up about?
Now it seems that politicians are beginning to address crowds as “Chers français at chères françaises” to placate the equal opportunities folk, instead of the old use of just “Chers français”. My sister told me some time ago about receiving letters from her children’s school addressed to “Queridos padres y queridas madres”: whereas in the past it was understood that “padres” covered both parents! And I have been known to grumble at the use of actors i stead of actresses. The gender-specific “actress”is deemed to be demeaning! No! I would never have wanted anyone to refer to me as a school master!
Well, the French are jumping on that same bandwagon and trying to invent a way of writing dual-gender terms.instead of “étudiants at étudiantes”, some people want to write “étudiant.e.s” and to refer to mixed groups of actors as “acteur.trice.es”. Goodness only knows how anyone is supposed to pronounce such terminology. Political correctness gone mad! Again! The Académie is having none of it.
And while I am getting indignant about stuff, here’s another matter. Facebook is full of reminders that November 11, Remembrance Day, is approaching. Some are reminding us to buy our poppies from a legitimate source and to avoid accidentally supporting a right wing nasty group. All well and good. Then yesterday I found this:-
“It's 99 years ago today that Wilfred Owen was killed on 4th November 1918. Could he have known that he would not last the War? He was killed exactly a week before it ended, and his mother received the fateful telegram on Armistice Day.”
Nothing at all wrong with that, you might say. Unfortunately it went on:
“Tea towel available here: bit.ly/2hGiKnP”.
Somehow that seemed wrong!
No comments:
Post a Comment