Monthly Archives: December 2015

New Year’s resolutions 2015: end of year review

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s review how I did on my 2015 New Year’s resolutions.

1. Read and see six Shakespeare plays.

Status: nearly passed.

I did five:

Although I failed to reach the official target of six, I’m still pleased with the result. All the plays were immensely enjoyable to read, and the performances I saw were terrific. Combined with the six plays from 2014, my higher-level goal of rapidly improving my Shakespeare knowledge has been achieved.

I’m not going to repeat this as a formal resolution for 2016, but I will keep an eye out for productions of other plays I haven’t read yet, and try to bag a couple more at least.

2. Repair my ZX Spectrum and complete The Lords of Midnight.

Status: partly passed.

I successfully repaired the ZX Spectrum, with the help of a new keyboard membrane and instructions from Dataserve Retro, and a SPECTRA interface (a custom-built electronic circuit which converts the Speccy’s output to SCART) from the ZX Spectrum Resource Centre.

I haven’t yet fired up Lords of Midnight, but the second half of this resolution will carry over to 2016.

3. Crawl through the ventilation shafts of a large building.

Status: failed.

A total disappointment, this one. I wasn’t even close: I didn’t identify any suitable ventilation shafts or get intelligence on any promising buildings. To be honest, I didn’t put much effort in at all.

Unprecedented flooding

Posted on by
Reply

The Prime Minister David Cameron has described the current floods as “unprecedented”.

Clearly nothing like this has ever happened before.

There’s no way that our political leaders could have foreseen these events.

No-one can blame Cameron for not seeing this coming.

He hasn’t got a crystal ball.

As the Prime Minister said, unprecedented.

Six Americanisms we should adopt into British English

Posted on by
3

Although I’m renowned among my friends as a language pedant, I know that pedantry has its limits, and can be taken too far. For example, I fully accept the following facts about language:

1. Languages have different dialects, which are each as valid for their own speakers as any other

2. Language changes over time

So I hope it’s not too shocking to reveal that I’m perfectly comfortable with the existence of a dialect called “American English” with different pronunciations and vocabulary.

I’m even comfortable with some influence and exchange between American and British. It was absolutely right, for example, that we British standardised to the short scale and accepted that a “billion” is a thousand million – though it would be nice if the Americans, in return, would stop being idiots and convert to an internally consistent date notation system.

However, I think it will probably surprise many people to learn that there are a few Americanisms which I actually think are better than their British equivalents, and which I’d be happy to see adopted as standard British English.

Continue reading →