Futility

Wilfred Owen on Folkstone Beach; idea of Danny Boyle

 

Futility
By Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

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2018’s Word of the Year

Wikipedia Commons

Collins Dictionary has selected its Word of the Year 2018. As the inhabitants of Planet Earth become ever more concerned about the environment and its alarming demise, so the words we use to describe all aspects of it — from victims to culprits, scourges to solutions  — rise in frequency and everyday usage. Collins has chosen as 2018’s top dog a common adjective that labels items — mostly made of plastic — which are made to be used once, which are poorly recyclable, and which have a significant negative impact on the environment. Can you guess what the word is? Continue reading →

You say smelled, I say smelt; you say dreamed, I say dreamt …

Clothes were hung up to dry …

Men were hanged at the gallows …

There are several common verbs that have more than one past tense or past participle — like spill, and hang. Where he spilt the ink, I spilled it; the villagers hung their clothes out to dry, but they hanged their thieves. Many of these usage differences are geographical, determined largely by which side of the Atlantic you’re on. (Brits tend to prefer the poetic “t” to the more formulaic “-ed”.) But not all. There are a few other factors — some of them slightly obscure, and even possibly unconscious — that can affect which past-tense version you decide to opt for. Continue reading →

Old-fashioned journo jargon

UPDATE, Nov 5: see a new entry – cock-up – below, brought to Glosso’s attention on our Facebook page.

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The world of journalism is changing — fast. Not just in terms of who is writing (or no longer writing) about what on which platform or outlet: it’s how and by what means the words travel logistically from the writer’s mind to the reader’s eye. And along with that shifting means of transport comes a whole new constantly-changing language. Let’s take a nostalgic journey back to the old-fashioned days of journalism when red pens, paper galleys, metal rules, fax and telex machines, telephones and glue sticks ruled the newsroom. Some of the old jargon from that time still floats around today, but mainly only in the dusty minds of us old scribes and subs … Continue reading →

Dead & quite: How two intensifiers behave on either side of the pond

First of all, what exactly is an “intensifier,” in grammatical terms? It’s an adverb or adverbial phrase that gives the adjective it precedes extra force or emphasis. (Intensifiers are actually a particular type of what we call a “sub-modifier”: an adverb used in front of an adjective — or another adverb — to modify its meaning.) British or American, we use standard intensifiers all the time: absolutely, completely, extremely, highly, rather, really, so, too, totally, utterly, very. And most of these “very variations” are used the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. But not all: there are in fact a couple of exceptions, one of which is quite ambiguous … Continue reading →

Porsche needs a proofreader

“Driver’s luxury $120,000 Porsche Cayenne has a VERY obvious mistake … So is it a fake?” So the Daily Mail reported yesterday. “A Porsche Australia spokesman told Daily Mail Australia the company was pretty certain the incorrect spelling of the badge was not a manufacturing error.  ‘Our attention to detail and quality control is second to none so I can’t envisage that happening on our end,’ he said.”

“Just to be safe,” the Daily Mail goes on to suggest, “drivers who have own a Porsche Cayenne should probably take a moment to double check their new ride isn’t sporting a spelling error.”

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