thelondonpap

Gareth emailed in to say:

I picked up a free paper on the Tube the other day and was surprised to see it had been rebranded. However I think the new name more accurately reflects its contents - see attached. (Of course, it could always be a really unfortunate page layout.)

And here's the paper in question:



Brilliant - thanks, Gareth.

Headlines: 'Blears jumps ship as Labour sinks'

Today's thelondonpaper has an interesting front page headline:

Blears jumps ship as Labour sinks

This is, of course, referring to Hazel Blears' resignation as communities secretary.

However I've always thought that someone who 'jumps ship' doesn't just leave one ship but joins another (metaphorically speaking).

To an extent, the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary (2nd Edition) agrees with me, saying:

if you jump ship, you leave a job or activity suddenly before it is finished, especially to go and work for someone else

So before reading the full story, I took thelondonpaper's headline to mean that Blears had jumped one ship (the Labour Party) to join another (probably the Conservative Party). I was, obviously, wrong.

And if you consider the literal meaning of 'to jump ship' - "to leave a ship without permission while it is temporarily in a port in the middle of a trip" (Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms) - there's no reason to involve a second 'ship'.

So why do I feel like it was a bad choice of headline?

Freelancere!

I spotted this picture caption in thelondonpaper a week or so ago:


When I leave my current job, I think I'd like to become a freelancere.

Due to the bad weather

A letter in today's thelondonpaper begins:

I am very discouraged to see signs up everywhere, both official and unofficial, starting with "Due to the bad weather..." This is as ungrammatical as "Ten items or less", as seen in supermarkets. It doesn't take much to get it right. We seem to be dumbing-down to a woeful degree in this country so as not to make things too difficult for people who can't cope.

I understand the '10 items or less' argument, but what is this letter-writer's problem with 'due to the bad weather'? He doesn't say, and for the life of me I can't work it out.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Friday roundup: watching me watching you

The Engine Room may only be the 118th best language blog out there, but it's the 53rd most clipped Blogspot blog - at least according to UKNetMonitor.

Who is it that has such an interest in what I write? Perhaps the London Lite, thelondonpaper and Metro are planning their revenge...

In other news, The Engine Room has been chosen as one of blogs.com's '10 Great Blogs about Grammar, Writing & Language'.

Most of the others blogs in this list are already in my blogroll but two new ones on me are Talk Wordy to Me, by a young* copy editor on a US paper, and Regret the Error, which "reports on media corrections, retractions, apologies, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the press".

Actually, I'm going to add both of these to the blogroll.



*By which I mean younger than me, of course.

'Average credit card interest rates have surged'

Spotted on the front page of yesterday's thelondonpaper:

Average credit card interest rates have surged from 17.2 to 17.6 per cent since May, according to banking research experts Defaqto.

My Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a surge as "as a sudden powerful forward or upward movement... a sudden large temporary increase".

I'm not sure that an increase from 17.2 to 17.6% over a six-month period is either large or sudden. In short, not what I would call a surge.

Following on from that, I think 'surge' is one of those words that is massively overused by newspapers, not just in headlines (because it is shorter and sexier than 'increase') but also in body copy.


UPDATE 14/11/08: Our web editor points out that a key attribute of a surge is its temporariness. So does thelondonpaper believe that interest rates will soon decrease? I'm sure the writer didn't give it that much thought when he chose the word 'surge'.

Cripes, Boris, it's Susie Dent again

From Thursday's thelondonpaper:

According to experts, 2008 has already given the English language more than 100 new words, ranging from the common "credit crunch" to "glamping" - to describe posh camping. Top of the list is "Cripes!" meaning surprise or shock, synonymous with Boris Johnson.

Where do I start? We've already had the discussion on whether 'credit crunch' is a word, so I'll leave that to one side. But is BoJo really synonymous with surprise or shock? And who else here knew of 'cripes' (with or without initial cap and exclamation) before 2008?

Thelondonpaper adds:

[Cripes] has joined a list of other words which have been so well-used in the past year they could be included in the Oxford English Dictionary

So only well used words make it into the OED? And 'cripes' isn't in the OED? Anyone have one to hand to confirm this? 'Cripes' is in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, so it would be utterly shocking if it wasn't in the full OED as well.

And who are these 'experts'? The only one named in the article is Susie Dent, who I'm guessing is on a mission to shift a few copies of her new book.

What's a European accent then?

Yesterday's thelondonpaper included a story headlined "An army of squatters moves into MoD flats". This par particularly struck me:

The squatters, who are mostly aged from their early 20s to mid 30s, milled about the site today, several of them speaking with European accents.

What on earth is a European accent? Birmingham is part of Europe, so perhaps all the squatters came from Birmingham.

But according to The Guardian's version:

Marcin, a 28-year-old from Poland, said: "There are people here from all over the world, Italians, Spaniards, South Africans, Portuguese."

There you go – detail. Much better.

'Friendly young woman, always sliming'

Spotted this great typo in free London newspaper thelondonpaper's "personal dating column". I'm assuming that the word is supposed to be 'smiling', although it could possibly be 'slimming'. Or perhaps the young woman in question is indeed "always sliming".

And I should point out that I was looking at this column purely for professional purposes. Really!

Juxtaposition: syphilis and a banana

A great example of juxtaposition in yesterday's free paper thelondonpaper, as you can see from the scan below (click on the image for a larger version).

A question to the 'urban doc' on syphilis is next to a question on vegan diets – the latter being illustrated by a picture of a semi-peeled banana.

It made me laugh, anyway. But I can't quite decide whether this was a deliberate move on the part of thelondonpaper's production desk or just a happy accident.

And rather embarrassingly, our web editor just walked over to ask me something when I had the scanned article blown up to massive proportions on my Mac...

Lovestruck by an emu

Free London paper thelondonpaper runs a regular column called 'Lovestruck', in which readers can write in with a short message declaring their interest in a stranger or near-stranger they've seen on a bus/met on the tube/drooled over while drunk.

As you can imagine, many of the messages reek of desperation and yesterday's column contained a particularly fine example:

To Alison, the long-legged emu-like girl I met in the Hampstead lido. You're gorgeous. Glass of wine? ANON.

I really hope there is more of a story behind this one, because I think calling any girl 'emu-like' is likely to backfire. No wonder Anon didn't manage to get her number when he met her in the lido (although to be fair, not many people keep a pen and paper or even a mobile phone inside their trunks...)

See Lovestruck online...

What a tasty bird

Don't lose your head

Free London paper thelondonpaper reports that:

A woman's corpse, with its head and hands hacked off, has been found in a binbag at a London marina. Detectives believe the victim was killed before her attacker removed the body parts

I suppose it's difficult to remove someone's head and kill them afterwards...