Comments

Seen and done — 26 Comments

  1. When I was at work I often had to write reports on staff absences and diarrhoea often got a mention.
    I could not remember how to spell the bloody word so resorted to “dire-rear”.
    Seemed accurate and easily understood. I used this method for around thirty years and no-one seemed to give a shit.

  2. “Blame the Americans. I always do and they usually are to blame.”

    Things have not been the same here since the 60’s.
    (Speaking only for myself; I blame John, Paul, George, and Ringo.) yeah Yeah yeah…..

  3. I love your Irishisms. It causes me to remember my mother’s family – my grandparents and my eleven aunts and uncles. They used words I did not hear in Scotland.
    But it has its own words, and I did not realise they were not “English” until I went south.
    So bring on all the dialect you posess.
    A joke.
    Knock, knock.
    Who’s there?
    Eureka.
    Eureka who?
    Eureka oxter guff.
    Award yourself a Black Bush, or three, if you understand.
    Thanks for all you do young fellow.

  4. Annoying isn’t it. I wince every time I see ‘was’ used as a generic marker for the past tense irrespective of context, as in ‘we was walking’ or ‘I was sat’. I have completely forgotten my grammar lessons and the tense’s official categorisation but to me ‘sat’ represents the past tense of an activty, so ‘I was sat’ means someone made you sit there. Maybe that’s just me and triggers my anti-authoritarian sentiments? Just don’t mention the lost distinction between ‘amount’ and ‘number’ or ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ which once separated mass quantities from individual items. As for apostrophes I think there is a suplus somewhere and it’s a plot to make everyone use them up, I’m sure some predictive text adds them to ‘its’ regardless. Local words and colloquialisms on the other hand add colour and character to your amusing ramblings, they aren’t wrong, simply Irish.

  5. Regrettably, or not, I suffered a very formal classical education where grammar was concerned and now can find trivial fault in almost everything I read, especially the grocers’ apostrophes and split infinitives etc.
    In practice, such pedantry is often misplaced, what really matters is that the intended meaning is clear and unambiguous – if it is, then I’m quite forgiving but, if there’s a scintilla of doubt, then my grammatical pedantry tends to be exercised at full volume.

    • I agree about the meaning being clear. The great exception of course is text-speak where “C U L8R” has a clear[ish] meaning but is the equivalent of sand on the eyeballs.

  6. Apostrophes are easy. The apostrophe simply shows where a word or a letter has been left out. So if we’re talking about John’s book we really mean John ‘his’ book. If we talked about the grocer’s book we are really saying the singular grocer, + ‘his’ book. Many grocers plural we write grocers apostrophe after the s. That means many grocers ,+’their’ books. Well that’s the way I remember it. It’s how I explained to second language English students as to why English seems such a daft language.

    ‘I was sat’,as is used now even on the BBC, used to drive me crazy but I have come to terms with it because I think our language is changing. It seems to me that ‘I was sat’ is streamlining English. But of course we do not hear ‘I was eat’, or ‘I was swim’, or such like.

    Teaching English as a second language must be more night marish now than it ever was in the past.

    Imagine trying to teach a class that ‘fo ohs’ actually means photos. And that it is an accent rather than the English language. I never liked the old posh BBC English, but I like the new BBC English even less.

    Should you find any errors in my comment it is because I read it to my tablet as I was lying on my back in bed.

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