Brief one, this. Again, mainly for our transatlantic cousins.

Not in a moment. For a moment.

Speaking of supermarkets, I am of course the sort of person who feels like taking a marker pen to amend those notices at the “quick” tills for those who have only a handful of purchases.

The signs ought of course to read, “Fewer Than X Items.” (Insert whatever number applies.)

Fewer, because “items” describes a plural quantity. For example; fewer accidents would be a boon.

If supermarkets had fewer notices with mistakes like this I would find myself with less to moan about.

“Less” ought only to be used with singular nouns (as in “more haste, less speed”) or in expressions like this post’s title, or my previous sentence.

This one is mainly for our transatlantic cousins – but I’ve noticed it creeping on to supermarket labels/notices here.

Regular means occurring at intervals. Even intervals.
It doesn’t mean “normal,” it doesn’t mean “less than jumbo sized.”
It means “every so often.”
How regularly do you think I might have to say this?

What?

No. I’ll just have a black coffee, thanks.

How do you pronounce the past tense of the verb “to eat?” (I mean you in particular, not you in the general sense.)

Like nearly everybody else where I grew up I have always followed the usual rules of English orthography in this instance and so pronounce the word the way it is spelled – in other words exactly as in the way I say the number 8. In any conversations I’ve had with others I have never failed to be understood when using ate in that way.

So why do others say “et?” How on Earth can the letter combination -ate be transmogrified in this way? And why do the same people not say, for example, I waited with betted breath, or my curiosity was setted, or he suffered a dreadful fet?

It’s nonsense. I never et a meal in my life. I ate quite a lot, though.

One of the ironies of the recent murder of the abortionist George Tiller is the description of the anti-abortion stance as being pro life.

I heard one of the main anti-abortion campaigners on the radio news saying, “He was one of the most evil men on the planet … He deserved … a legal execution.”

After searching on the internet I found a reference to this in this article.

Tell me. How can you possibly be pro life and yet at the same time be in favour of execution?

Among the leaflets we received was one from the No To EU party.

At least I think it’s from the No To EU party.

What the leaflet actually says is no²eu – all in lower case! – which I read as no squared, eu; or perhaps n, o squared, eu. Of these, I only recognise N as an SI unit. (Even then it would have to be a capital letter.) The remainder are gibberish.

I suppose it’s meant to be text-speak (no2eu) – which is a less than serious way to communicate with voters I’d have thought – but this mob can’t even get this right as the 2 is superscripted, thereby becoming the mathematical symbol not for the number two but instead the indication that the preceding symbol is to be multiplied by itself (squared.)

So, mathematically, we have no x no x eu, or n x o x o x eu which (expanded) become n x o x n x o x e x u and n x o x o x e x u.

What a glorious example of shooting yourself in the foot. I didn’t bother reading the rest. If they’re not prepared to engage with me as a literate and numerate adult I’m not going to treat them with respect either. I’ll just take the piss.

They do, however, give the lie to Nigel Farrage (whose surname is only its final vowel away from an apt description of the man) of UKIP who said in their PPB that UKIP was the only party standing for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Well, what do you expect from someone who looks and sounds like a sinister double-glazing salesman?

The Labour and SNP leaflets barely mentioned the EU at all, the Tories only to bash it in derogatory language. The Lib Dem leaflet was the only one that came anywhere near a programme for engagement with the EU.

There was nothing from the Greens. That’s my vote sorted then.

No, it bloody isn’t. Not in a UK parliamentary election, anyway.

Most of the time it’s nearest the post or, more often, quite-a-long-way-from-the-post-actually.

I happened to catch last week’s Question Time on the TV and some punter in the audience was banging on about how it gave us strong government.

Oh, yeah? Like the Major administration, or our present incumbents?

And strong government isn’t necessarily a good thing. A dictatorship is strong government after all. Don’t forget strong government gave us the depredations of Thatcherism.

I wish all politicians, punters, pundits, psephologists and the like would stop using this lazy, misleading description.

Or, better still, the former should give us some form of PR.

Any form of PR would likely be better than the present farrago where MPs and Governments regularly get elected on less than a quarter of the vote, never mind of the total electorate.

I was at work today.
And so was the rest of Scotland.
(Those of us with jobs still left, that is, in these credit-crunched/recessed/depressed, pick your description of choice, times.)

The first disruption came when my usual signal to get up (Terry Wogan) failed to appear on tbe radio.

After a full day I’d forgotten of course. When I got home and was about to sit down to eat I switched on the TV at the usual time expecting to catch the news. It wasn’t on. Instead there was some stupid film. And the so-called British media keep on referring to “the holiday.”

Well it wasn’t. Not for the whole of the UK, anyway.

Only one of the many annoyances perpetrated by the majority in ignorance of the quaint customs of the northern part of these islands.

The worst ramification of this nonsense came when, quite a few years ago now, Scottish banks decided to take English – and Welsh, I suppose – Bank Holidays. This meant that Scottish bank customers and businesses which were open as usual on Good Friday, Easter Monday and the last Mondays in May and August, couldn’t access their normal banking services and on Jan 2nd the banks were (uselessly) open even though the rest of Scotland was shut.

I suppose most shops etc. down South now open on these days, though, so not much difference in that regard.

Being interested in both Science Fiction and history I just love that sub-genre of SF which comes under the description of Alternate History but I must say I dislike the term itself.

Alternate of course means “by turns.” Alternate History ought, then, to mean history that occurred, changed, then reverted to its first course, then back to the second, etc. etc.

Alternative is no use either as it means “the other of two” – of only two; and of course there are myriad possible scenarios for history as it wasn’t, not merely two.

Proper [ie serious] historians denote Alternate History speculations (in which they do indulge themselves from time to time) by the term counterfactual history which, while being correct in essence, is a bit Latinate and unintuitive, not exactly snappy.

Which leaves us with what?

I know it’s probably too late now, but can I make a plea that we start calling the stuff Altered History?