Scion of Cerberus

JD just asked me for my view on this sentence, from our micturating correspondent:

Of course Chrysler is now a scion of Cerberus as opposed to a stain on Stuttgart's P&Ls

By dint of some determined research he managed to translate it, but as a fine example of sub-baffling copy I felt it deserved preservation.

And, tomorrow being my last day in the engine room we share, I feel it is only right to embarrass JD by mentioning that I couldn't have asked for a finer colleague with whom to end my days at the coalface. He's invited me to keep blogging, which I hope to do from my seaside hideaway at Whitecliff Bay on the Isle of Wight (look it up on line, overseas chums; it's ever so pretty).

And JD – remember our motto: eschew solecisms!

Headline: Diligent Bankers' present in Budapest

One of the news stories on our intranet has a highly ambiguous headline:

Diligent Bankers' present in Budapest

Before you read on, I invite you to guess the main thrust of the story using only the headline as guidance. If it helps (which it doesn't), the headline was accompanied by a picture of a smiling woman.


Ready? OK, here are my own wrong guesses and then the correct answer:

At first I thought the headline might be referring to a gift given to or by a group of bankers. But why are they diligent? And why do they deserve a capped-up 'B'? Perhaps there is an organisation called 'Diligent Bankers'...

My second interpretation was that the same group of bankers (or organisation) is simply present in Budapest, for some unknown reason. And of course, that would fail to explain the apostrophe.

Only upon reading the story did I learn that the headline referred to a presentation given in Budapest by employees of a banking publication – the title of which could, at a push, be shortened to Bankers'. Why were these non-bankers diligent? Because their presentation was on due diligence, of course.

Anyone guess that?!

I think I need to micturate

Like all engine room stokers JD and I like our English plain and simple. But sometimes you have to admire writers who play with the language, even in ever-so-'umble trade magazines.

Our wittiest contributor recently came up with:

a case of micturation ‘twixt scapulae masquerading as precipitation

I recognised scapulae as shoulder blades and knew precipitation is a grown-up word for rain. But I confess to looking up micturation, which is when I realised he was telling our readers: "don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining".

Sadly it had to go because we can hardly expect our long-suffering readers to refer to their dictionaries simply to understand what they're reading, but it did make me smile.

Only a similar note, it occurs to me that an erroneous vertically delineated canine-arboreal interface might be an impressive replacement for a dog barking up the wrong tree.

Would anyone out there care to come up with more silly versions of common phrases?

H bombs are out of date

In the London freesheet which JD and I read a minor war has broken out in the letters page under the rather witty heading 'Dropping an H bomb on the word warriors'.

Furious pedants have been using unparliamentary language on each other over what they see as a life-or-death struggle over the form of indefinite article to be used before words beginning with an 'h'. One correspondent asserts that "an hotel is correct because the word is French and you are not supposed to pronouce the h but rather say an 'otel".

Turning to the very first page of Fowler's I immediately found that 'an' which I have always called the indefinite article, is known to grammarians as a central determiner. Which would be a great fact to use at a cocktail party, were I ever to be invited to one.

But on the use of a/an before h-words in which the first syllable is unstressed Fowler, having admitted that opinion is divided, says:

The thoroughly modern thing to do is to use 'a' (never 'an') with an aspirated 'h' (eg, a historical) but not to demur if others use 'an' with minimal or nil aspiration given to the following 'h' (eg, an historic).

However, it seems that the use of "an hotel" is now old-fashioned. The bottom line, according to Fowler's, is "the choice of form remains open".

So much for pedantry.

An 'istoric 'otel

Phobias: fear of long words

We've had an email from one of our regulars saying that she recently came across the word 'hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia', rather ironically the fear of long words.

This seemed like a spoof or a joke to me so I looked into it and the best information I found was on Wikipedia:

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia — fear of long words. Hippopoto- "big" due to its allusion to the Greek-derived word hippopotamus (though this is derived as hippo- "horse" compounded with potam-os "river", so originally meaning "river horse"; according to the Oxford English, "hippopotamine" has been construed as large since 1847, so this coinage is reasonable); -monstr- is from Latin words meaning "monstrous", -o- is a noun-compounding vowel; -sesquipedali- comes from "sesquipedalian" meaning a long word (literally "a foot and a half long" in Latin), -o- is a noun-compounding vowel, and -phobia means "fear". Note: This was mentioned on the first episode of Brainiac Series Five as one of Tickle's Teasers.

Elsewhere, however, the consensus seems to be that the relatively brief 'sesquipedaliophobia' would be sufficient to convey the meaning.

Yet another suggestion I came across for a word meaning 'fear of long words', and my personal favourite, is 'megalogophobia'. Not to be confused with a fear of a certain Philippine language, which of course would be Tagalogophobia...


(We've actually written about phobias on this blog before, most notably hobophobia and pogonophobia.)

Idioms: cut the mustard

A great quote in some recent copy:

"Our economic regeneration team has been sitting down and figuring out how to get this application to cut mustard"

Well, you could always laminate the application form – which would make it sturdier and possibly also mustard-proof. Or else you could print the application directly on to a knife or other cutting tool.

Seriously, all it took was for the idiom to be used slightly unusually ('cut mustard' instead of 'cut the mustard') and on first glance I read it literally rather than idiomatically. That's the danger of idioms – apart from totally confusing non-native speakers, of course.


And if you are interested in the origins of this idiom, the World Wide Words page on 'cut the mustard' is a good place to start – or else check out Yahoo! Answers for some alternative explanations.

Double meanings: baby bits

Seen on our work intranet:

Baby bits for sale

I hope this is referring to toys, clothes, cots and such because otherwise it's just disturbing.

Hey, journo, leave those kids alone

Learn your roots: verbiage

Our delightful and erudite news editor sashayed through the engine room hatch t'other day chortling over a newly arrived press release. Not the first time I've heard her react in this was to a press release, of course, but in this case the cause of her mirth was the heading: "VERBIAGE".

No doubt someone at the PR agency thought verbiage means 'words' from the Latin verbum. Not so. It's from 19th century French and means "excessively lengthy or technical speech".

Oh, the perils of neglecting a classical edukashun.

Channel 4: Embarrassing Illnesses

One of our contributors has e-mailed in the following ad spotted on her work intranet:

Channel 4’s Embarrassing Illnesses are doing a series of shows including a programme focussing on men's health.

They are interested in hearing from men who find discussing issues with their doctors embarassing.

If selected, your condition will be treated by professionals and you will receive top quality surgery and treatment. Your involvement will raise awareness about your condition, helping other sufferers to seek the treatment they need.

Please contact [details withheld]

So... you are a man who has an embarrassing illness. You find discussing this issue – or perhaps all issues – with your doctor also embarrassing. So what do you do? Volunteer to take your illness on national television of course. That's much less embarrassing.

(I also like the way that 'embarrassing' is spelt wrongly in the second par. Everyone makes spelling mistakes, but the show is called 'Embarrassing Illnesses' for goodness' sake...)