Word of the day: smirting

Today's word is something that people in England are going to be a lot more familiar with come July 1, and which is already a common phenomenon in the rest of the British Isles and in certain other parts of the globe. Yes, it's smirting.

Smirting is a portmanteau word (another one!), a combination of smoking and flirting, and refers to the practice of smokers flirting outside public places where smoking is banned, such as pubs and restaurants.

According to Wikipedia, the term is thought to have originated in the Republic of Ireland some time after the public places smoking ban came into effect there in March 2004. An article the following year in the Observer suggests "having a quick drag has replaced speed dating as the best way to spice up your love life".

England, get ready to smirt!

Beckham: true to himself

From the Engine Room inbox:

Spotted this little gem in a particularly bad local magazine that drops through our door every month or so.

“Of course, David Beckham is first and foremost a footballer, and every youngster who ever kicked a football will harbour the desire to play like Beckham. The young David Beckham was no exception to this desire...”

Ignoring the mangling of the various tenses in this statement, and the suggestion that youngsters born in 1900 would have subliminally wanted to play like a man who wouldn’t be born for 75 years, I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that David Beckham’s only ambition when growing up was to play like David Beckham. Well, I wanted to play like me, and I achieved that, but it didn’t do me a whole lot of good!

We're all alcoholics now

I know I've written a lot about shoddy language use in newspapers recently, and about the woolly use of figures, but this is a particularly fine example of both so bear with me.

I'm a "dependent drinker". So are you. At least according to free London paper Metro today.

Its lead story is about "problem drinkers" in the UK costing the health service £1.3bn a year. It goes on to talk about "dependent drinkers"- even worse than problem drinkers - who "down up to 50 pints a week".

Now think of a number up to 50. I choose, um, 10 - but you may have a different number.

So far this week I've drunk five pints and no doubt will drink a few more by the end of the week - quite possibly 10 in total. That's a number 'up to 50', as we've just established. So that makes me a dependent drinker. Thanks, Metro.

In fact, by this logic, the only people who aren't dependent drinkers are those who drink - or rather, down, which is quite a feat - more than 50 pints a week.

(Interestingly, the version of the story on the Metro website doesn't include the offending phrase, so maybe they realised their mistake.)

Precision... we can and must achieve it

Just because everyone does it, that doesn't make it correct. I'm referring to the sloppy use of "can".

A senior writer in our care presented the magazine's comment piece this morning, including the exhortation: "We cannot let this affect our decision". This was changed to "We must not...". Why? Because the OED defines "can" as "be able to". The writer did not mean "We are unable to let this affect our decision" so she shouldn't have written it.

And yes, I do know that recent editions of the OED give credence to sloppy usage by admitting "be permitted to" as an alternative meaning of "can". Even Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition) accepts this usage "in informal circumstances". But the 2nd edition on JD's desk doesn't, and neither do I.

English abounds in such subtleties as the difference between "may" and "can". We should not sacrifice precision simply because a generation of schoolkids (and graduates) have not been taught to pick their words carefully.

Daily Mail fashion advice

According to a 'Did You Know?' sidebar in a Daily Mail feature on recycling yesterday,

It take just 25 two-litre pop bottles to make one adult-size fleece jacket

Yes, possibly – but even if you could find something to glue the bottles together with, you'd end up looking like the Michelin Man. And it would hardly be comfortable...

(Seriously, a company called Greenpac does make clothing from plastic yarn taken from melted-down drinks bottles, but there was no explanation of this in the Daily Mail story – hence the strange mental image. With language, context is everything.)

My good friend Mr Wholesale

An Engine Room regular has suggested that Apus and I are a little too critical of the writers we work with. By way of apology, I'd like to share an anecdote showing that sub-editors are fallible too.

I was checking a page proof when I came across the sentence: "The licence was lost by Mr Meats Wholesale" - 'Mr Meats Wholesale' of course being the name of a wholesaler. However I read it as the name of a person: first name Meats, surname Wholesale.

As a result I was left wondering why Apus, who I knew had subbed the copy, had used 'Mr' before this person's name, as it isn't our house style to use titles.

Eventually I reached the conclusion that 'Meats Wholesale' could be the name of either a man or a woman, and therefore the 'Mr' was necessary to indicate the gender of this person called Meat. Well, it made sense to me...

When bacteria tastes good

Despite the flak I got a while back for reading - and blogging about - the back of my toothpaste tube, today I've decided to write about a yoghurt pot (or 'yogurt', if you prefer).

Yesterday I ate a Yeo Valley Organic Strawberry Bio Live Yogurt, and noticed that the packaging claims that

the fresh, mild taste comes from using the friendliest bacteria and the juiciest fruit

I can understand the correlation between the juiciness of the fruit and the freshness and mildness of the taste, but where does the friendliness of the bacteria come in? Do friendly bacteria really taste fresher and milder? And if so, how exactly is the friendliness of bacteria measured?

But I suppose that making your yogurt taste fresh and mild is in itself a friendly act, and therefore the friendliest bacteria are the ones that taste the best. QED.

Tesco teaches teenagerese

The Daily Mail yesterday carried a story about Tesco issuing "a phrasebook of 'teenagerese' to its growing band of workers over retirement age to help them understand their younger colleagues and customers".

The paper listed some of the words and phrases in the phrasebook (plus definitions), including 'wack', 'buggin' and 'phat'. However two of the words given were 'vexed', and 'rank' (with the meaning of 'disgusting, horrible'). I didn't think either of these were slang - and the OED agrees with me.

But next time you admit to being vexed by a rank smell in Tesco, don't be surprised if you see the supermarket's more mature employees reaching for a phrasebook...

Finance can be fun

I came across a great financial acronym yesterday.

I'd already heard of management buy-outs, or MBOs, which is when a company is purchased by its existing management. However, when a company is purchased by a combination of its existing management and an external management team, this is known as a 'buy-in management buy-out', or - wait for it - a BIMBO.

"We bought the company through a BIMBO." Immortal words.