Saturday 31 October 2015

Jeremy C...Hunt




This clip was recorded from Sky News at 11.35pm on 30th October 2015 at the start of the newspaper review section.

The newscaster is not the first person who has made this slip trying to say the name "Jeremy Hunt"

Apologies for the poor sound quality, but the clip was recorded on a mobile phone.

Sunday 23 August 2015

Sloppy Journalism



A recent article in the Daily Telegraph on the subject of online banking payments included the following sentence:
 
For this to be true, an individual would have to make more than 1,643,835 transactions per day; equivalent to more than 68,493 per hour, 1,141 per minute or 19 per second.

Canny Linguist thinks this is highly improbable.

In the old days, newspapers would employ competent sub-editors to correct such nonsense before publication.

Friday 6 February 2015

Bigots begone!



Conservative Education Secretary Nicky Morgan recently declared a “war on illiteracy.” As if to demonstrate the need, the BBC today published a Press Association photograph of a placard being held by anti-UKIP protesters in Rotherham, the town in Yorkshire where, for years, the loony left has ignored the serial sexual abuse of young girls.




If you are going to accuse someone of bigotry, at least learn how to spell the word.

The purpose of the demonstration was to prevent Nigel Farage from making a public appearance. It is somewhat ironic that those who claim UKIP to be an intolerant political party are themselves intolerant of the right to free speech by anyone who dares to disagree with them; but that’s Socialism for you.

Sunday 1 February 2015

A sign of the times


The headline in today’s Sunday Times reads “All children must learn times tables”. According to the article:

Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, today unveils a “war on illiteracy and innumeracy”, warning that a future Tory government will remove head teachers who fail to ensure every pupil knows their times tables off by heart.

The Prime Minster joined in the act by Tweeting:
  

If there is to be a war on illiteracy, then perhaps those who should know better could start the campaign by referring to ‘multiplication tables’ and not ‘times tables’. You do not, as many people sadly believe, times one number by another. You multiply.

How many multiplications must people be told to speak proper?