Ertblog

Yr hen iaith yn y Guardian

It's good to see yr hen iaith (the old language, or Welsh, to English readers) appearing in the Guardian. The paper ran a wonderful story last week suggesting you might get a 50% discount for parking your car in Llanberis if you asked for your ticket in Welsh. A few days later the paper ran a correction:

"This is a very nice car park" should be "Dyma faes [not maes] parcio hyfryd".

You can't expect an English paper to understand the complexities of Welsh grammar:  many of us whose Welsh is rusty would have forgotten that dyma causes a soft mutation, turning maes into faes.

"West Ham stadium talks" - BBC

Clever stadium...

Sekur Mortgages: get a spell checker!

I spotted this sign on a recent visit to Chester. This mortgage broker invested in a shiny sign - but didn't check how to spell independent...

It's easy to be critical. Most of us working in PR and marketing will have painful memories of spotting a glaring error after it was too late. And a former colleague of mine once signed off a letter as 'Pubic Relations Manager'. (I suspected that was wishful thinking...)

I once ordered a bilingual sign for the Welsh NHS Confederation (the body that represents NHS management). It came back with a garbled version of the title in Welsh. I insisted the signwriters did the job again as they had got it wrong. It wasn't the first time a Welsh sign had defeated an English signwriter: in the heyday of the railways, the signal box at Waenledr became Red Meadow.   

What's a full enquiry?

Soon after news broke of Richard Hammond's disastrous accident, we were told that a 'full enquiry' would be held.

No one ever promises to hold a partial enquiry. But just as suburbs can only be leafy, and families are always hard working - even the toddlers - enquiries must be described as full.

Belgium: satnav and phrase book welcome

I like my gadgets. But I've always seen satellite navigation systems as an indulgence, except for professional drivers.

I'm prepared to think again after getting hopelessly lost in Belgium recently. We were heading for the German city of Aachen, after an overnight stop in Bruges. All was going well, as we followed the A3 motorway signs for Brussels and Liege. Suddenly, we saw traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. Odd sort of motorway, we thought. Then we emerged in the heart of Brussels. No sign of Liege or the A3 motorway.

We finally realised that we had crossed Belgium's language line and all the French road signs were now in Flemish. We should have been looking for Luik not Liege, despite the fact that the city is overwhelmingly French speaking. Not hugely helpful - why can't they put the signs in both languages? I can imagine the fuss if signs on the M4 in Wales directed drivers to Llundain and Bryste rather than London and Bristol....

dotCYM: campaigning for a .cym domain for Wales

A new campaign, dotCYM, is campaigning to gain Wales a .cym domain, securing the nation's place in cyberspace. (The proposed .cym domain is an abbreviation of the Welsh name for Wales: Cymru.)

The campaign has its own website, which explains the case in English, Welsh, Gaelic and Catalan.  Why Catalan? Because Catalonia won the top level domain .cat last year. (See Catalonia's campaign site.) For Wales, Catalonia is the example to follow as its success showed that a country that wasn't an independent state could win recognition from ICANN, the body that governs the internet's address system.

If dotCYM succeeds, .cym will be available for any website in Welsh or which is part of the Welsh cultural community - including websites and blogs created by Welsh speakers in Patagonia. It will be the online equivalent of all those CYM stickers seen on Welsh cars.   

What the hell does hat tip mean?

I imagine it means 'I'm impressed'. But who the hell has worn a hat since Winston Churchill was prime minister?

Pure jargon. Don't forget the golden rule of communication: if what you say leaves your audience guessing, find another expression.

Perfect summer reading - a stylebook!

In the heat of the summer, I've found the Guardian's stylebook an easy travelling companion.

It's not everyone's beach blockbuster. But I find its idiosyncrasy and insights compelling on hot tube journeys.

For anyone who works in PR, it pays to remind yourself now and again of the style of our major publications. And it's worth seeing whether you can spell correctly the names of people and places as diverse as Alastair Campbell, Trevor McDonald, Lucian Freud and Johns Hopkins University.

A few gems:

"Resist the temptation to write such nonsense as: 'grey is the new black'."

"It is a (very persistent) myth that 'none' has to take a singular verb."

"'North of the border' - avoid as the Guardian is a national newspaper."

"'Newcastle-under-Lyme' hyphens, 'Newcastle upon Tyne' no hyphens."

Needless to say, the Guardian's pronouncements on style are not compulsory. Other publications will take a different stance, especially on use of capital letters. (The Guardian uses lower case where many other papers - especially in north America - prefer caps.)  But it's good to think about language - it is, after all, our toolbox.

What's in a name?

The tragic artwork accident in County Durham prompted the BBC to tell us how to pronounce Chester-le-Street. As ever when French words become English - and British - place names, the original pronunciation goes out of the window.

It reminds me of my university days in Leicester. I soon learned to say Beecham (as in the composer and medicine) rather than Beauchamp. Closer to home in Wales, I knew that Rogiet (just outside Chepstow) would fool me - the locals called it Roggit....

Mind, we don't just mangle names with French origins. One of my student digs was in Beaconsfield Road, Leicester. We said it as it was spelt. Now I live in Buckinghamshire, I've learned to call it Becconsfield, to blend in with the locals....   

7/7

After September 11 became 9/11, it was inevitable that the London bombings would become known - by the media at least - as 7/7.

The British, of course, would never have thought of September 11 as 9/11 - we'd have called it 11/9.

How odd that the date of Britain's atrocity reads the same in date shorthand on both sides of the Atlantic.