Bugbears: SVO,O,+VO

Taken from a recent BBC News technology story (which appears to have been taken down, but you can still Google this phrase if you don't believe me):

A gadget for the blind reads labels, audio books and plays music.

I see this type of sentence construction a lot, even from professional journalists, and I believe that most people don't have any problem with it. But I do.

This gadget reads labels and plays music, but what does it do with audio books? 'Read them', I hear you say. But, except as a headline, you would never write:

A gadget for the blind reads labels, audio books.

Instead you would write:

A gadget for the blind reads labels and audio books.

This suggests the original construction needs another 'and'. Giving you:

A gadget for the blind reads labels and audio books, and plays music.

I suppose the comma is optional, but it helps indicate a change of verb is coming.

Spelling can be (pomer)grate

My local Sainsbury's supermarket is currently selling a type of fruit called, according to the printed labelling, a 'pomergrate'. I can only assume that it's like a pomegranate, only better.

Just a shame the pomergrates aren't pomergratis...

And no, they aren't part of the SO RAS range.

They're grate...

Impossible quiz question

Found in the book Total Trivia: Over 2,000 Zany Quiz Questions:

Q. What percentage of British Engineers, to the nearest five, are women?

A. Two and a half per cent.

Umm...

Recent gems

Jut to end a long working week on a high note, here are a few gems that have oozed under the engine room door:

• "But now motor insurance readers last week agreed"

• "The company began in humble beginnings"

• "This agreement is expected to result in 5,000 units being produced annually per year"

• "In a statement the company says"

And they wonder why JD and I sometimes growl at our charges.

Right that's it; my turn to hide in Spain for a week. Hasta la vista! (what does that mean, anyway?)

Headlines: children job seekers

A couple of dodgy headlines today. The first, from yesterday's Daily Mail (October 4):

Agony of the children job seekers leave in Romania

The first time I read this, I wondered who these children job seekers were, and why the headline didn't appear to make grammatical sense. Of course, the Daily Mail has elided a 'that' between 'children' and 'job', presumably for reasons of space. Very confusing.

And Gingerous sent in the following headline from the BBC News website:

Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has been involved in a car accident with a 10-year-old boy

He asks: "Why was a 10-year-old driving a car?"

Wikipedia says that "sometimes a 'car accident' may refer to an automobile striking a human or animal" but I agree that it's not the most common use of the phrase. It does have the benefit of not implying that Gerrard was to blame, unlike a lot of alternative phrases.

The Engine Room: a mystery explained

You may be wondering why sometimes Apus and I refer to 'the engine room' (no caps) and sometimes to 'the Engine Room' (initial caps). After all, it's not like subs to be so inconsistent, is it?

Well, Apus and I work for the production desk of a particular publication. Long before I joined the publication, Apus had developed the habit of referring to the production desk as the engine room of the magazine, for obvious reasons. I picked this habit up from him, and when we came to start the blog, it seemed the perfect name.

So when we refer to 'the engine room', we mean the production desk on our magazine; when we refer to 'the Engine Room', we mean the blog you are reading. Of course, you may ask why we don't cap up the 'the'...

Australian business-speak

It looks like business-speak isn't limited to the US and the UK: Roz has written in with some examples heard during a one-hour 'Dialogue Day' session at the Australian Taxation Office. Here they are, with Roz's comments in brackets.

• Key drivers

• Key deliverables

• Key strategies (why can't they use some synonyms for 'key'?)
  

• ...sessions around delivery plans (whatever happened to 'about' or 'regarding' or 'concerning'?)

• At the end of the day

• Cascade down corporate messages (well, cascades don't often go up do they?)

• Efficiencies made to business (how do you 'make' an efficiency?)

• Big ticket item

• Co-design session

• Impacting on all the messages out there

• Hip pocket

• Value-adding

• A deliberate service model (what – as opposed to an accidental one?)

• Sophisticated profiling and risk

• Level playing field

• The tax agent community (yeah, there's probably an axe-murdering community too. Everything has a community these days)

• Principles-based

• Penalty 'safe-harbour'

• Grass-roots issues

• Base tenants (I think the $120,000-per-year idiot meant tenets)

• Capability-building projects

Thanks for those, Roz. 'Level playing field' is one that often appears in our publication; we hear all sorts of gubbins about 'communities'; and 'impacting' is one of my personal bugbears. So I feel your pain...

Spanish: dos servicios

Biggest language blunder while on holiday in Spain: confusing 'dos cervezas' with 'dos servicios' – yes, I went into a bar and asked for two toilets instead of two beers.

I then compounded my error: attributing the barman's look of confusion to my poor Spanish accent, I repeated my request several times, each time slightly more loudly and clearly.

I never did get my 'dos servicios'.

Two please – large ones

It's just fortunate that, before I left the UK for Spain, one of our reporters took me aside and warned me not to confuse 'pollo' with 'polla'...

Blog update

I'm back from my holiday now, so thanks to Gingerous for uploading my posts for me.

The blog has gone from strength to strength in my absence: last week was our busiest ever, in terms of both hits and visitors. Partly this is due to another good mention on BuzzFeed – this time it was Apus' post on the OED dropping hyphens that hit the limelight.

We've also had a fair smattering of blog cross-pollination: see this post on Villa Grammatica, or this one on Roadput.com. Although who jessihempel is, I don't know.

My next task is to persuade Apus to install Firefox so he can put pictures on his blog posts (at the moment he is posting solely through the power of righteous indignation).