Fulsome does not mean heartfelt – nor even complete.

It means overdone; excessive; fawning; perhaps even insincere – especially when describing a tribute.

I was checking my blog’s stats earlier this week.

It never fails to amaze me that a high number of visits to this blog seem to arise from my post about Mary Campbell Smith’s poem The Boy In The Train.

There are lots of hits for Art Deco too, which actually tend to predominate.

However what caught my eye this time was someone looking for the spelling of sulphur.

I accessed the search page they’d used and found this blog entry. Its last line is a beauty.

I do hope Jon Edwards from the RSC has looked at it (and at my reply to his comment on my take on the subject here.)

I note also that I was 22^nd equal in the general blog category in the Scotblog Awards and 67^th equal overall. Four votes plus a panel nomination was all that took. (I’ll need to tout for votes next year.)

Today I received a glossy four page flier (folded A3 size, then) – I think it came with my newspaper – calling itself Holyrood Magazine. Its strapline was, “Are you in the loop? Holyrood Magazine is Scotland’s award winning current affairs magazine.”

The banner headline was “Education in Scotland 2010″ about a conference to take place in Edinburgh on Tue 23^rd Feb.

The introduction to Session One: Scotland’s Education System started,
“It has now been 10 years since the power to make decisions was handed to Scotland and it’s administration.”

I stopped reading right there.

It was clearly written by someone who needs a bit more education him or herself. It was also not adequately proof-read.

Where’s the brick wall to bang my head against?

Well, we won’t make it to Jupiter this year. We haven’t even made it to Mars.

Just one more example of how the future wasn’t.

Happy New Year anyway; to one and all.

*Btw; I hope we’re all pronouncing this year as “twenty-ten.”

Another free Saturday, so a chance to say Nigella Lawson was on TV when I switched it on this morning.

And she mentioned liquorice, which she pronounced more-or-less as “likorish.”

Of course many Southerners do this but I don’t recall ever hearing this way of saying the word until I went to visit my cousins on England’s South Coast in nineteen hundred and long time ago. It’s bugged me ever since.

No-one, for example, says rice with a “sh” sound at the end.

Anyway, Nigella moved me to look the word up and my dictionary (Chambers Twentieth Century, 1972) gives the pronunciation as “lik’ ə-ris (in US also -rish)” so Nigella and all those Southerners are actually saying it the American way.

Why?

(Of course my Chambers was a Scottish publication but it doesn’t give lik’ ə-rish as an English form of pronunciation. It does also give the alternative spelling licorice.)

For some time now The Royal Society of Chemistry, which is obviously a British organisation, has recommended the use of sulfur as the spelling for sulphur. (This has the knock on effect of also meaning using the forms sulfate and sulfite for naming compounds containing respectively the sulphate and sulphite ions; or hydrogensulfite and hydrogensulfate for what before more systematic naming came about used to be known as the bisulphite and bisulphate ions.)

I have now learned that the SQA, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, (my italics) – again domiciled within these islands – will also be taking up this egregious practice.

The imposition is of course an American usage and is I suppose being introduced on the grounds that sulphur is easier to spell this way. But is it?

I agree that Americans – and increasingly we Brits – do write fantasy for phantasy but on this side of the Atlantic we do still tend to cling on to phantasm rather than fantasm.

Yet do Americans write of fotografs or fotons? They seem to manage those all right while using ph.

What is so special about sulphur that singles it out for this treatment?

And why not go the whole hog, here, and spell it sulfer to make it more like it sounds?

I do admit some people confuse it with silver – though since silver is a greyish metal and sulphur a yellow non-metal I can’t for the life of me see why. I think the “new” spelling will only make such confusion worse, though.

But whatever next?

Will we be forced to adopt aluminum?

Can we perhaps look forward to spelling the main ingredient of carbolic soap as fenol? Or the acid-alkali indicator as fenolfthalein?

Will element number 15 be known in the future as fosforus? (No, of course not. Its symbol is P and it only ever gets confused with potassium – which for historical reasons has the symbol K. F is in any case already taken as the symbol for fluorine.)

It’s all nonsense. Stop it.

Now.

I for one will not be changing my spelling practices.

Accept no substitute. Stand up for ph.

The good lady told me she caught Mike d’Abo (the former Manfred Mann frontman, successor to Paul Jones) on TV last week talking about one of the songs he wrote, Handbags And Gladrags. She got the impression it had been written for Rod Stewart but I said I was sure Chris Farlowe had recorded it first.

D’Abo apparently said he had to write a woodwind part for Stewart but since he doesn’t write music he had to have someone transcribe it.

Whatever, the song has since become more widely known as a result of The Stereophonics recording and the version which was used as the theme music for Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” TV series.

I dislike the Stewart and Stereophonics versions both. (I can’t remember “The Office” one clearly. I didn’t watch that show.)

In theirs the relevant lyric is rendered as:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat to buy you,”
which is okay but implies a willing benevolence on the grandad’s part and is rather sweet.

However it means something completely different – and much less damning – compared to the original:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat so you could buy,”
which is more redolent of the wastrel ways of an ungrateful grandchild.

This is Chris Farlowe’s version (from 1968):-

There is, by the way, a connection of sorts between Chris Farlowe and myself. But I don’t want to make too much of it as I have read he has become something of a right winger and BNP adherent. (If this is not the case I apologise to him.)

There are no prizes for getting the connection as it’s pretty obvious.

I know the description is kind of metaphorical and reflects a Gosh-Wow! attitude to the phenomenon and that light can’t escape from below the event horizon.

But they aren’t…..

Black, that is.

Not always, anyway.

Certainly not if they are attracting material from nearby stars. Then they must be the biggest firework displays in the universe.

For example:-

The artist’s impression comes from
http://www.gwu.edu/~sps/Society%20of%20Physics%20Students%20%28SPS%29/Events/A136FC42-F9B5-46A5-A0CB-F0007B262E14_files/Black-hole.jpg.

Here’s another nice one showing material from a nearby star bleeding into the accretion disc.

That is from https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/images/nasa_black_hole.jpg.

Not at all bad for something that’s described as black.

Yesterday for the first time in ages I caught Countdown on Channel 4.

Jeff Stelling doesn’t seem right to me (but a lot better than Des O’Connor anyway.)

But the numbers game! The replacement for Carol Vorderman said “times it by.” Times it by!

She’s a grown woman, presumably with a Maths degree or something involving Maths at least.

She should know there is no such verb as “times it by.” It’s multiply.

Susie Dent in dictionary corner ought to be correcting her.

[Carol Vorderman also annoyed me with the way she set out the arithmetic as she would write things like:-
100/50 = 2 x 6 = (12 + 1) x 25 = 325. The "new" woman (I'm sorry, I don't know her name) did this sort of thing too.

Now, 100/50 = 2. It does not equal 2 x 6.
2 x 6 = 12; not (12 + 1) x 25.

It might seem like a little thing .......
but I get faced with such arithmetical rubbish on almost a daily basis in my day job.

Don't give the pupils any excuse, please.]

No. It’s not.
It’s guising.
Or at least it ought to be. Certainly in these islands.

“Trick or treat” is the American version.