Today began bright and sunny. It grew dull later but maybe by late afternoon the sun will have come out again. This has happened quite frequently of late.
Recently some local vandals seem to have discovered the joy of pushing the neat top layer of stones off the wall and into the undergrowth on the other side. If anyone ever gets round to putting them back, it’s going to demand a major piece of work retrieving them.
Writer Louis de Berniêres was having a bit of a rant in yesterday’s Guardian, or maybe the day’s before that. He was objecting initially to people throwing rubbish out of car windows, mostly wrappings from fast food outlets. I’m with him on that; when their is some sporting event at the cricket club up thenroad from here, it is very common next morning to find the grass verge littered with all sorts of mess, where cars have been parked and food of one kind or another has been consumed and the detritus left behind.
Mostly, however, he wanted to talk about use of language, as like me he suffers from misosaskopeslexis whih is a “Greek”word he invented to mean hatred of pointless words. More specifically he objects to the use of the word “like”, liberally inserted into so many sentences. “I once went to speak to a sixth-form group, “ he wrote, “where one perfectly intelligent young woman said “like” so much that it took her five minutes to say something that should have taken five seconds. The effect was embarrassing and bewildering. Afterwards, in private, I begged her to stop doing it.”
Like me he also finds the disappearance of the letter “t” annoying: “Glottal stops are thriving like Himalayan balsam on the banks of a beck.
He even gave us a bit of Mardle - Norfolk dialect, probably now fading away like so many local dialect, replaced often by Essex-speak: “It is part of the continuing tragedy of our loss of regional dialect. Oi’m a proper vexed bout thaht, bor. Oi’d a rather be a hearin good ol Mardle, speakin pussnally.”
As for me, I find myself also seething about pretentious and incorrect use of foreign language, especially on signs and notices. A local cafe has a menu on a printed notice outside the door, including ‘soup de jour’. I have had ton restrain myself from going in to explain that you can have “soupe (with an ‘e’ please note) de poisson” - fish soup - and ‘soupe de tomates’ - tomato soup - but not ‘soupe (even with an ‘e’) de jour - day soup, made from cooked days! It has to be “soupe du jour” - soup of the day. And why not just advertise ‘soup of the day’, using English? Which I think all the people around here speak quite well!
On the subject of language, here’s a word that was the OED’s ‘word of the day’ recently:
Broughtupsy- Caribbean for good manners and courteous behaviour resulting from a good upbringing, decency, propriety.
I like to think our children had a good broughtupsy.
Life foes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.
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