Category Archives: Language

Stroppy 2024!

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As we bid farewell to the Emmys the spotlight turns towards the Stroppys – or rather the Stroppy, there being only one such award for meaningless twaddle each year. After much thought and hand-wringing the winner is… drum roll… anonymous. Yes, that’s unfortunate, but I don’t know the name of the author of this gem, extracted from a report written for a certain international financial institution based in Washington DC:

James Joyce (portrait)

“A weigh station that is also a public check post shall undertake checks in its capacity as a weigh station unless it is established to the satisfaction of the authorised officer that the payload on the truck or combination being checked originated from the nearby urban agglomeration in which case the check shall be made in its capacity as public check post, and if the truck or combination is found to have committed an infringement requiring immobilisation then that infringement shall be waived and the truck or combination allowed to travel directly back to its loading point for rectification without penalty or permanent record of noncompliance.”

Marcel Proust (caricature)

At only 106 words this sentence can hardly be considered Joycian or even Proustian. But it makes up for that in its opacity, convolution, clumsiness and… well, let’s just sum it up as twaddledom.

I am indebted, not for the first time, to my long-term friend and sometimes colleague Ron Allan, who nominated this passage.

And here’s an unrelated thought bubble… I just read that the average human exhales 255kg of CO2 per year. That’s equivalent to an old-fashioned ounce per hour, so it seems plausible. 

Boeing 747: First roll-out (30 September 1968)

Back to the individual level, the average person exhales about 20t of CO2 over a lifetime. If this number is correct, our species is directly putting 2 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.  This is as much as 800 million petrol-powered cars.  Or 90,000 Boeing 747s.

Perhaps a childless person who voluntarily undergoes sterilisation should be issued with carbon credits.  What do you think?

By the way, do you happen to know (or be) a film producer in need of a potential blockbusting script for a TV series? If so, please let me know.

The 2023 Stroppy

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This year’s winner of the Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Drivel is a Russian man called Ivan Panin (pictured left) who fled Russia for Germany at the age of 18, being condemned as a “nihilist” in his homeland, and then migrated to the USA. He studied Greek and Hebrew at Harvard and made a name for himself by applying numerological principles to the Bible.

The award is made posthumously because Ivan died in 1942. Fortunately for him the Stroppy is not subject to the same irksome requirement as the Nobel prizes, which can only be won by the living.

He was commended to me by a man called Greg whom I met in Rundle Mall. He was proffering a pamphlet titled ‘Searching for Truth?’ and I was intrigued enough to stop for a chat. He turned out to be a member of the Revival Fellowship and he invited me to one of their meetings, where I would find people speaking in tongues and thereby be convinced of the existence of God. I asked which tongues they spoke and he explained that “tongues” meant a special language used to converse with God, which ordinary people couldn’t understand. I’d always thought that the Holy Spirit gave the apostles the power to speak foreign languages so they could go out and proselytise, but apparently not.

Anyway, I recommended that he read ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins (pictured right) which I’d just finished, and he recommended that I read Romans chapter 8 and Google Ivan Panin. Ivan wins the Stroppy for this passage, but pretty much anything he wrote could be a contender:

Looking once more to the 7 periods from Adam to the Christ by themselves, covering as they do the whole Bible Chronology lacking only 33 years, we find that they cover 3999 years, a number unexpected: since man would have made it an even 4,000. But 3999 is 3 x 31 x 43. The sum of its factors is 77, itself 11 sevens, with 14, or 2 sevens as the sum of its own figures, 7, 7. The sum of the figures be factors 3, 31, 43, is also 14, or 2 sevens: of which the first two have 7, and the third has 7. This number 3999, though itself not a multiple of seven, is nevertheless found to be marked with 4 features of sevens, one for every one of its four figures.

A worthy winner, I think you’ll agree.

PS  I was nearly misled in my search for Ivan Panin, because he has a namesake who is still alive and is a noted mathematician. Amongst other feats, according to Wikipedia, he found a proof of Gersten’s conjecture in the case of equal characteristic and an affirmative solution of the “purity” problem for quadratic forms. So… no meaningless drivel there.

#$&% !

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I’ve blogged before about the coy use of asterisks and other non-letters to write a rude word without actually write a rude word. This habit gave birth to “the F-word” and “the C-word” and “the N-word”. I decry this. If you want to write “fuck” just do it. If you want to use less coarse language, write “copulate” or a more precise and acceptable word to substitute for one of the ocean of other meanings that “fuck” has acquired.

Judge Judy in Judgement

I came across a new alphabetical euphemism in a recent Guardian Weekly: “the P-word”. It was in an article about racism in English cricket, specifically in Yorkshire. There was no glossary or footnote to explain this neologism. Can you, dear reader, explain it to me?

On the other hand there are some highly objectionable words that seem to pass muster. I am a fan of Judge Judy (deep down I think we all are) and I just finished watching an episode in which a plaintiff referred to the defendant as “white trash”. This manages to be doubly objectionable:

  • It reduces an individual and a whole social class to the status of rubbish.
  • It implies that all non-whites are trash, so a modifier has to be applied only if the person being insulted happens to be white. “Black trash” would be a tautology.

It takes flair to insult so many people with only two words; or stratospheric stupidity; or mega-misanthropy.

Another such word in “bogan”, which exists only in Australia I think. It is defined as “an uncultured and unsophisticated person; a boorish and uncouth person.” No-one’s sure of the origin of the word, but there’s a Bogan River in New South Wales. Anyway, there’s no way of using the word in a non-derogatory way. Thus it is different from “larrikin”, “rascal” or “Pommy bastard”.

While we’re on the subject of the injuries sustained by the English language, don’t forget to submit your entry for the 2022 Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle (aka The Stroppy). Closing date: Saturday 15 January (noon GMT). Announcement of the winner: 17 January.

Respect

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The English language is rich in words that allow for nuance, subtlety, shades of meaning and ambiguity. One of these words is ‘Respect’. 

  • In Australia it has been attached to the fight against domestic violence: the hotline for victims is 1800 737 732, or 1800 RESPECT (I suppose the T is redundant). 
  • Children are supposed to respect their parents and teachers.
  • In traditional societies, old people are automatically respected irrespective of their personal qualities.
  • After centuries of humiliation China is demanding respect from other countries, while doing all in its power to be undeserving of it.
  • In the Britain that I grew up in it was a middle class aspiration to be respectable.
  • As a boy I was taught to raise my cap to a woman as a mark of respect, even if I had no knowledge of the woman’s character.
  • We are all enjoined to show respect for the dead; to respect other people’s opinions and beliefs, however much we may disagree with them; and to respect the sanctity of a holy place.
  • But we also use phrases like “with respect to” meaning “in relation to” or “having regard to.”
  • And a sentence that begins “With all due respect” always ends with criticism or an insult.

I had a quick look at my copy of Roget’s Thesaurus (Old Boys’ Public Speaking Prize, 1962) and found ‘Respect’ listed under the following headings: Deference, Fame, Salutation, Observe and Reference.  ‘Respectable’ scored mentions under Repute, Upright and Tolerable.

According to the Bible (Acts 10.34) the apostle Peter said, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.”  This was explained to my RI class to mean that God pays no heed to a person’s status – confusing to a classroom of boys who were forced to show respect to teachers merely because they were teachers.

All this is meant to demonstrate that one should never assume an understanding of what someone means simply from the words they employ.  I might even say that words are increasingly being used to distort and blur meaning. 

I say, what a great segue to a reminder to start hunting your nomination for the 2022 Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Drivel!  Deadline: 10 January.

Stroppy 2021

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It’s been a tough choosing a winner of this year’s Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle.

Mondelēz’s brands!

We thought it would probably go to ex-President Trump, but a careful examination of his speeches and tweets persuaded us that we’d have to look elsewhere. The Donald makes liberal use of untruths, half-truths, lavish insults, unfinished sentences and non-sequiturs, but he doesn’t deal in meaningless twaddle. He’d be less dangerous if he did.

Instead, the much-discussed and coveted award goes to a major global food conglomerate: Mondelēz. They own… well, look at the logos – even Toblerone! Even Cadbury, for heaven’s sake!! So it’s no surprise that they turn over US$26 billion per year and have a market capitalization of US$79 billion.

Therefore they must know what they’re doing, right? And when they adopt a radical new approach to marketing, we should also take notice, right? Especially if it’s called “humaning” and disdains caution and anything so mundane as data. So how about this…

“Humaning is a unique, consumer-centric approach to marketing that creates real, human connections with purpose, moving Mondelēz International beyond cautious, data-driven tactics, and uncovering what unites us all.”

I don’t know much about marketing (my book sales bear witness to this) but I do know that these 28 words are the collective winners of this year’s Stroppy. Congratulations, Mondelēz!

PS  It’s 1 February. When I was a boy in London and then the north of England there was a superstitious belief that if the first thing you said on the first day of every month throughout the year was “white rabbits” you would have good luck.  But I never remembered to say it every month. Did you grow up with the same belief?

Cats and Tribes

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We have a cat staying with us at the moment, so I was thinking about posting about that species. Then last week we saw a documentary about life in a black suburb in the USA, and I thought I should write something about that. Then I realised that what I would write about one is pretty much what I would write about the other.

The fact is that my relationship with Bella (the cat) is characterised by mutual bemusement. She rubs around my leg in the morning and is pleased to have me stroke the top of her head – once. Then she stalks off shaking her head as if to rid herself of parasites. Later in the day she alternates between rolling voluptuously on the carpet in my path, bolting in apparent panic at my approach, and ignoring me.

I’d like to have a conversation with Bella, to find out how she sees the world, human beings, and me in particular. Is she conscious of her own mortality? Does she distinguish between the humans she knows, or is it just a matter of who last topped up her food bowl? Above all, is she curious about the things she sees humans doing? Curiosity killed the cat, as my prep school teachers would say to any wayward child who exhibited curiosity about anything that wasn’t on the immediate syllabus; but are cats curious about things other than the next meal and the warmest place to sprawl?

And it was exactly the same with the American documentary. I found myself at a loss to understand the ways, manners, habits, choices and even the speech of the people on the TV screen – fortunately the programme was subtitled. It wasn’t just that they were black; it was that they seemed to live in a parallel universe in which drugs, gangs, guns, unemployment, promiscuity and incarceration are normal.

Of course, it’s not unusual for a certain neighbourhood to contain a preponderance of one ethnic group or another, but it seems to me that in the USA (much more than in Australia or the UK) the black population has seceded from the Union and developed their own culture, language, values, forms of religious expression, even their own de facto laws.

My mind went back to 1966, when I used my university vacation to travel around North America. It was the year after the infamous Watts riots in Los Angeles, and I was curious about the term “motherf***er” – new to me at that time. Did negroes (an acceptable word at that time) really believe that white mothers were in the habit of having sex with their sons? I sought out the neighbourhoods I’d read about – as well as those I’d heard about through songs (Kalamazoo, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Buffalo, Laramie…). I hoped to come home with insight but gained little.

I was brought up when the British considered their empire to be a great civilising force, replacing the ball-and-chain of tribalism with the institutions, laws and infrastructure of a modern nation state, illuminated by the glory of The Enlightenment. It looks to me as though that high-minded project has ground to a halt and shifted into reverse.

Bath Milk

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There was a programme on ABC Radio National this morning, about farmers in Queesland are selling raw milk (ie unpasteurised) labelled “Bath Milk”. In that state it’s legal to sell raw milk, but only for cosmetic purposes. Well, Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk, so why not the ladies of the Sunshine State?

But of course it’s a ruse. People are apparently willing to pay a premium of 100% or more to drink unprocessed milk that might make them sick. “OK,” you may say, “it’s their risk, so why not let ’em?” In fact, that’s what one of the interviewees on the programme did say.

That’s also the view of the anti-vaxxers and the many people who have chosen to go onto the street to demonstrate in support of the Black Lives Matter campaign, flouting* the rules about social distancing. They draw a parallel between what’s happening in the USA and what happens here when indigenous Australians run foul of the law. Understandably perhaps, they consider this to be an important enough issue to justify breaking the odd rule.

But it makes me stroppy. Why? Because the cost of your risky behaviour will be borne in part by the wider community, therefore the community has a right to restrict your risk-taking. Even if you have top-shelf private health insurance the cost of hospitalising you, treating you and perhaps cremating you will fall on your fellow policy-holders.

I suppose I’m a socialist at heart. I want my freedom, but I acknowledge that I cannot succeed at anything without a measure of security, rule of law, health and welfare safety nets, subsidised education (for which I have the taxpayers of Lancashire to thank) and a robust functioning economy. To enjoy all of that I must accept certain responsibilities, and they include looking after my own health, maintaining my productivity and obeying democratically enacted laws.

You too.

* I have noticed that substituting the word “flaunt” for “flout” has moved from being an occasional slip of the tongue towards becoming the norm. It’s joining the ranks of “A bacteria”, “Between you and I, me and Jim are going steady” and “You can’t underestimate the importance of climate change”. Is this happening only in Australia, or it is a verbal pandemic? If so, is anyone working on a vaccine?

NIS Again: SA’s Interconnector

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I coined the phrase ‘Numeric Incompetence Syndrome’ a while back, and yesterday an article in my local newspaper delivered another glaring example. In summary…

South Australia’s connection to the national electrical grid is to be enhanced with a new 900km interconnector to New South Wales and Victoria. The capital cost is expected to be $1.53 billion. The article states: “To cover that, households would pay $9 a year in SA and $5 in NSW.”

Assuming an average household size of 2.7 persons (as in 2016 nationally), there are about 0.65 million households in SA and 3.11 million in NSW. So the total annual amount recovered from households would be ($9 x 0.65M) + ($5 x 3.11M) = $21.4 million. Even allowing for future population growth, this comes nowhere near “covering” an investment of $1.53 billion: to amortise such a sum over a 20-year life at a discount rate of 5%pa would cost $123 million per year, before considering any maintenance costs. So that’s error No.1.

The article goes on to say, “[ElectraNet] estimates the project would deliver overall benefits of $924 million over 20 years…” but adds that “the Australian Energy Regulator … has downsized the project’s 20-year benefit to $269 million.”

Who, in their right mind, would invest $1.53 billion in something that will deliver benefits of only $924 million over 20 years?! How can any sub-editor not see that this cannot be true?! Perhaps the word “net” was omitted, but surely “overall” was inserted to make clear that the writer means gross benefits.

My stroppiness is going off the scale. Journalism is not just about regurgitating people’s press releases; it has to involve some critical thought, some fact-checking, some exercise of common sense for heaven’s sake!

I have emailed the Editor of the newspaper with a link to this post and an invitation to respond and/or to publish a correction.

This Year’s Stroppy

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We had some strong nominations this year, but after much internal debate the Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle goes to … drum roll … Ram Charan and Julia Yang, authors of a new book called ‘The Amazon Management System’, published by Ideapress Publishing and available… well, in most places where you’d look for a book these days. My old friend Ron Allan, who made the nomination, selected the following gem:

“Moreover, transparency of such ultra-detailed, end-to-end (cross-silo and cross-layer) real-time and inputs-oriented data and metrics makes the usual uphill battle for cross-functional collaboration much easier.”

With management advice like this, who needs saboteurs? Thanks to Ron, and congratulations to Ram and Julia.

Oh, and the picture is a visual pun on ‘Amazon’, not an intended likeness of anyone either living, dead, extinct or mythical..

Pride

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No-one is greater than Greta;
Humanity should fête her.
Tho’ belittled and trolled
She’s outspoken and bold –
If I were younger I’d date her.

Even without the photo you’d know which Greta I was talking about, wouldn’t you? Greta Thunberg has joined the small group of people for whom a single name is sufficient: Donald, Gandhi, Madonna, Mao, Meghan and the rest.

The reason I’m featured Miss Thunberg is that I heard her father interviewed on ABC radio the other day. The interviewer’s final question was “Are you proud of your daughter?” He answered “No,” having already explained that he and his wife had tried hard to dissuade Greta from becoming an activist for a cause they initially had little interest in.

It made me think about the word ‘proud’ and its derivatives. I remember as a child being told that I should be proud of my school uniform, and wondering why, since I’d had no hand in its design or manufacture. Moreover, I knew that pride came before a fall and in Religious Instruction I’d been taught that pride was altogether a Bad Thing. Even without knowing what ‘contumely’ meant, I got that Hamlet was not keen on proud men.

Of course it’s natural to feel pride in one’s own achievements – coming top of the class, winning a prize, scoring a goal – even though prophets, psalmists, apostles and Shakespeare are united in disapproval. But how can one possibly be proud of something that one has made no contribution to? How can I be proud that a person or persons unknown have won a match, or confronted a terrorist, or put out a fire?

I suppose a parent can feel pride in having brought up a child who does something good, and perhaps that’s what the ABC’s interviewer had in mind. But evidently Mr Thunberg believes that Greta did it all by herself; indeed, she did it despite her parents’ efforts to stop her. Good for him for giving an honest answer.

Or perhaps ‘proud’ and ‘pride’ are ambiguous words that mean different things to different people. ‘Respect’ is certainly such a word, and I’ve made a mental note to post something about that too.

While we’re on the subject of language, don’t forget that the announcement of this year’s Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle (aka ‘the Stroppy’) will be made on 17 January. Get your nomination in now! Deadline: 2359 hours GMT, Thursday 16 January.