I see the BBC has reported a British oil refinery has gone bust.

In today’s world, oil products – whether they be the petrol, diesel or fuel oil most directly obtained from refining crude or the plastics, chemicals, medicines etc derived by further processing – are the most sought after substances; excepting (possibly) illegal drugs.

So with markets like that, how the hell can an oil refinery go bankrupt?

To be fair, the headline on the news was a little misleading. It is the parent company which owns the refinery which has gone bust.

But the point still applies.

There has been a lot of scaremongering about the possible effects as the refinery supplies 20% of south-east England’s fuel needs; scaremongering no doubt put about to raise fuel prices. I would expect that some other company will take it over sooner rather than later.

Menawhile Britain’s debt has reached 1 trillion pounds* for the first time.

The Coalition cuts are working well to reduce the debt then, aren’t they?

I also see UK growth was -0.2% for the last three months. Not much scope for joy there.

Why are these idiots repeating the mistakes of the 1930s?

*That amount being illustrated on the BBC news last night as £1,000,000,000,000 is, to my old fashioned eyes, actually a million million or what we used to call a billion. Well, it was before we took up US descriptions of such things.

Snuck?

I heard this on TV recently. On British TV, I might add.

This is a word that does not exist in British English. The past participle of to sneak is “sneaked.” (How does anyone get from “sneak” to “snuck”?)

I can only refer you to this web page – where it implies snuck is not even “proper” US English.

Twice within one day recently I heard/read this verb being used as if it means “warns of” or “signals.”

Once was by a member of Snow Patrol talking about vinyl records – which are apparently making a comeback. He said about their appeal, “It’s that pre-emptive crackle.”

The other was in a piece of fiction where this sentence appeared, “The sky has taken on that bright translucent quality that pre-empts a thunderstorm.” (The thunderstorm later arrived, thereby making the sentence obtuse.)

One more word in danger of losing its meaning because people don’t actually know what it means?

To pre-empt is of course to forestall, to stave off: as in a pre-emptive military strike which seeks to prevent an enemy performing an action or to destroy part of their forces before they can be used. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was an attempt at a pre-emptive strike. I say attempt because, crucially, it failed to destroy the US aircraft carriers.

The Israeli air force has carried out successful pre-emptive strikes (at the start of the Six Day War and when they attacked the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.)

One of those songs from 1970 that still had a 60s feel.

I do hate the spelling, though.

Due to the ongoing problems with the missing contents this is just a short one. Plus I haven’t done one of these for a while.

Why should something be a shoe-in? What on Earth can the phrase have to do with footwear?

OK; I agree shoe is spelled the way shoo sounds. But why would you use one to usher in a dead cert? Unless you’re confusing it with to shoehorn. But that means the opposite of certain. You only use a shoehorn when you’re having difficulty getting a shoe on your foot. If it slips on there’s no need for a horn.

I’ve always thought of this as a shoo-in, as in shooing something away.

It seems it’s actually derived form horse-racing, from a “fixed” race where you only had to “shoo” the intended race winner over the line.

Much as I thought.

This is a relatively uncommon but still frequent enough misconception. I have noticed it twice recently – I think in Adam Roberts’s Stone – but also in Saturday’s Guardian.

An aureole is a halo, as seen in religious paintings. Like the similar aura it is derived from the Latin word for gold and implies shininess.

What it isn’t is a small circular area, such as around a nipple. That is an areola.

The recent outbreak of food-borne disease in Germany caused by the organism E. coli has had me groaning at the utterings of the news presenters and reporters.

To be clear: E. coli is a bacterium. To refer to disease-causing bacteria is incorrect in this context unless there is another, different, organism also involved in spreading the disease.

An individual E. coli organism can of course rapidly produce copies which mean there are loads of them about but they are still the same species, the same type of bacterium. There is only one bacterium involved.

Curiously nobody seems to get confused about this sort of thing when a virus, rather than a bacterium, is the problem. Reporters will say for example, “the virus is spreading.” (Compare “the bacteria are spreading.”)

But then, unlike bacterium, the word virus has an English plural, not a Latin one.

So it’s not just me!

I clicked through to this while looking at a comment Jim Steel left on facebook.

Ann Patty may be a kindred soul.

Her point about proof reading at publishing houses is a good one.

I would have had the same reaction as her to errors in a manuscript.

If an author doesn’t know the nuts and bolts of the language she/he is writing in it’s like an electrician not knowing how to wire a circuit (only a bit less dangerous.) I don’t feel inclined to trust her/him any more.

The thing is, misuses such as the lay/lie confusion are becoming so widespread that they are in danger of obscuring the valuable distinction between the two meanings and the chances are English will, in the future, be the poorer for it.

Bloomsbury, 2010. 403p.

This is the latest in Boyd’s apparent taking up of genre fiction. Okay, An Ice-cream War was a historical novel as were The New Confessions and Any Human Heart but he is not generally considered a writer of genre. Yet having most recently tackled the spy novel in Restless, he now ventures into thriller territory. (I doubt he’ll be trying SF though.)

Returning a briefcase left at a restaurant where he was eating to a man with whom he had struck up a conversation, Adam Kindred stumbles into a murder scene. The victim is still barely alive and asks Adam to remove the knife from his body. Disoriented, Adam does so and the victim promptly dies. Suspecting the murderer is in the next room, Adam flees with the briefcase and thus becomes the prime suspect. So far, so very The Thirty Nine Steps. What follows deviates from that template but is still pretty much a standard thriller where Adam sleeps rough, takes up begging, attends the Church of John Christ, changes his name, links up with a prostitute and her son, then later with the policewoman who was first on the murder scene! – all the while pursued by the murderer at the behest of a big pharmaceutical company with a secret to hide. The secret is of course in the briefcase.

Put like that this sounds ridiculous. Not very literary is it? Admittedly the novel doesn’t touch the heights of earlier Boyd offerings like Brazzaville Beach, Any Human Heart or even Restless but it is very readable, rollicking along at a fine pace – and the characterisation is good.

It is also a signal reminder of how easy it can be to stay lost in modern society. Use no banks, mobile phones nor credit cards and you are virtually invisible; certainly hard to trace. Whether the novel much enlightens the human condition is something different, though.

The story is told from the viewpoints of several of the characters and Boyd does that mainstream thing of giving their histories. I know it’s supposed to add to roundness and provide motivation but it struck me that really – especially if this knowledge is essential to the plot – it’s just another species of information dumping.

Inevitably with multiple viewpoints some of the narrators are less engaging than others. I was at first irritated by that of the chairman of the research company Calenture-Deutz but it is a sign of Boyd’s skill that he is able to elicit sympathy and even compassion towards him.

The writing appears effortless, very little jars (but see below) and the stupidity of Adam Kindred at the start apart – don’t touch the knife! – is psychologically convincing. If you like thrillers with a bit of character meat to them give it a try.

Small rant alert:-
Within, we have the old homonym “vocal chords.” These are cords; as in small pliable cylindrical pieces of living tissue. They vibrate as air passes over them and so produce sound. They are not a set of musical notes sounded simultaneously. Does no-one proof read any more?

An epicentre is not some sort of super centre, not the very centre of an event or a circle. (That would be …. the centre.) The word, derived from ancient Greek through Latin, actually means “situated on a centre” and so is not in fact a centre at all.

Similarly, an epicycle such as Ptolemy used in his system of explaining astronomical observations is a cycle on a cycle and not the main circle of rotation.

As far as an earthquake is concerned – where the word can be used in its strict sense – the epicentre is the point on the Earth’s surface nearest to the earthquake’s hypocentre, which is the real “centre.”

To hear reporters on the news talking about the epicentre of the recent E Coli outbreak in Germany is annoying as they quite clearly are talking about the point from which the outbreak radiated, which would be its centre. There is no need to qualify or heighten the term in any way.