Greece fears batter markets again

This is one of those headlines where almost every word could be a noun or a verb.

I initially read this as "Greece is afraid of the markets for batter. Again." I was like, do people trade in batter? Does this have something to do with declining fish stocks?

Headlinese is terrible for this sort of thing.

Go Pullman. Go Pullman.

Philip Pullman defends his new book 'The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ' from someone who says the title is "offensive".

The best minute and a half of video I've watched in a while.

Deep volcanic hydration?

Volvic are doing their bit to make the world a stupider place by re-running their '14-day challenge' TV ad. It's an irritating ad in lots of ways - it's one of those ones that has a 'genuine' member of the public showing their 'genuine' enthusiasm for the product (which the gimp in question refers to exclusively as 'Volvic' rather than 'water'). Anyway, my beef with it is the following sentence, which is accompanied by a pseudo-scientific animated graphic of, like, volcanoes and layers and shit:

"Because Volvic filters through six layers of volcanic rock, it delivers deep volcanic hydration."

Deep volcanic hydration? Deep volcanic hydration? This is the worst kind of pseudo-science arse and I'm sick of advertisers getting away with it to flog their latest rebranding of their crappy product.

I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about this stoopidness about a year ago when the ad was first running, and I thought I'd share their response with the interwebs. They told me:

"We feel the ad draws attention to the way in which Volvic water is filtered. Whilst we understand your concerns, the ad doesn't claim that Volvic is superior to tap water or other mineral water. Furthermore, the ad doesn't make any claim about the relative hydration levels of types of water or state that Volvic hydrates the body in a more efficient manner. We understand that some viewers may object to the claim 'deep volcanic hydration' but we don't consider it likely to materially mislead viewers about the product."

So Volvic gets to keep polluting everyone's brains and the world keeps turning. Ho hum.

Wise words

I spoke at an event this week about how to write clearly. To illustrate my points I used a few quotes, which, now that I've gathered them, I thought I'd share here:

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

George Orwell

“If you got to use that kind of language about a thing, it’s ninety-proof bull and I’m not buying any."

Big Daddy, in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Think of leads as though they cost you 10 bucks per word, or as if every word were to be engraved on stainless steel while you’re sitting on a hot stove.”

Jack Cappon, Associated Press 

“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Samuel Johnson

“If you feel the decorative impulse coming on, lie down until it goes away. Strong feature writing is simple, clear, orderly and free of labored mannerisms and tricks that call attention to the writing itself rather than the substance.”

Jack Cappon, Associated Press

The Cappon quotes are from his brilliant book 'The Associated Press guide to news writing' (previously published as 'The Word') and the Orwell quote is from his 1946 essay 'Politics and the English language'. 

Hard-working families

The Guardian's Mind Your Language column, written by the editors of its style guide, now has its own blog, which has made it straight on to my list of stuff I like.

In the inaugural post, David Walsh asks readers to pick their least favourite cliches from politicians' electionspeak. One of his own pet hates is "hard-working families". I agree. Even just "families" on its own has become something of a buzzword.

When a politician says "families" what they almost always mean is "people". Or have the main parties given up seeking the votes of orphans and single people?

Native Americans?

I recently read a fantastic book called 1491 by Charles Mann, which is all about the Americas before Columbus.

The book isn't just about the history, it's about the history of the history, if you like. It's about how popular views of what the continent was like before Europeans arrived, have changed over time.

I got so engrossed in this excellent book that after finishing it I read all the appendices, one of which is titled 'Loaded words', and is about the language used to describe the people who inhabited America before Europeans arrived.

At this point you are either thinking, "You mean the native Americans?" or, "You mean the Indians?"

Mann writes:

"Anyone who attempts to write or even speak about the original inhabitants of the Americas quickly runs into terminological quicksand. And the attempt to extricate writer and reader by being logical and sensitive often ends with both parties sucked deeper into the mire."

It's a hilarious quirk of language that a whole continent's people got the wrong name because Christopher Columbus didn't know where he was. Indians (the ones in America) are obviously not Indian, because they're not from India. But 'Indian' is far from being the only misnomer in the English language, and let's face it, it has stuck.

The term 'Native American' was popularised in the 20th century as a more accurate and sensitive alternative to 'Indian'. But some people have pointed out that anyone born in America is a 'native American', whatever their ethnic background.

So what's the right thing to say? Obviously you don't want to upset people, but that in itself is a slippery concept (who was upset? When? Why? Was it justified?) Mann says he tried to call groups of people by the name they call themselves (another minefield, not least because none of the people of America thought of themselves as being 'Americans' at all until 'Europeans' showed up). He writes:

"In conversation, every native person whom I have met (I think without exception) has used 'Indian' rather than 'Native American'."

So, based on this experience, he ends up using 'Indian' in most instances, and 'Native American' here and there to avoid repetition.

A lot of nonsense gets talked about which words are or aren't offensive, and a lot of strange arguments get put forward about how the derivation of a word means it should or shouldn't be used. It's good to remember that, actually, things are a lot more mixed up than that, and there probably isn't a right or wrong answer.

Why do foreigners make their languages so hard?

On April 1st, the National Centre for Languages announced "high level negotiations with foreign governments" to get them to simplify their languages for Brits.

The French are looking at merging 'le' and 'la', and a representative of the Goethe Institut reveals details of "an ambitious five-year plan to remove case endings from German nouns".

Have to admit, I went through a good few seconds of outrage before noticing the date on this one.