Tom Watson and a dangling modifier

Here's a nice golf-related dangling modifier from a recent BBC Sport story:



The paragraph in question is this one:

Having won five Opens and three Senior British Opens, including the 2003 tournament at Turnberry, the adoring British crowd had roared on Watson from the moment he carded an opening 65.

Obviously it is (Tom) Watson who has won five Opens and three Senior British Opens, not "the adoring British crowd".

Credit crunch or recession?

Today's Metro includes the following news headline:

Bag snatches
rise as credit
crunch bites

Perhaps someone should let the paper know that 'credit crunch' isn't a synonym for 'recession'.

Tellingly, the body copy doesn't mention 'credit crunch' once but does refer to "rising unemployment... caused by the recession".

However I suppose that neither 'recession' nor 'unemployment' would have fit quite so easily in that three-deck headline.

(I would scan in the article but the scanner seems to be on the blink.)

A margarita and a margherita and a...

One of the bars near my flat runs a two-for-one offer on pizzas from Mondays to Thursdays. It also runs a two-for-one offer on cocktails before 7pm.

So if you were to go at 6pm on a Thursday, for example, you could order a margarita and a margherita, and get a margarita and a margherita free.

That's the spirit! (Photo from Flickr)

You know it's a slow news day when...

Sarah has emailed in to draw my attention to a story on the Telegraph website entitled Ghostly image of Michael Jackson appears on car bonnet.

She writes:

What on earth were The Telegraph thinking when they decided to put this on the website? I can only imagine that it was a slow news day. My favourite bit is at the end where they quote Gary Sloggett on what he did when he saw the photo [of his car]: "I immediately turned to my wife and said: 'What is Michael Jackson doing on my car bonnet?'"

This is my favourite part of the article:

"It's quite extraordinary," said Gary, of Stafford. "The obvious explanation is that it seems to be some sort of cloud formation that just happened at the time."

Yes, it's the reflection of a cloud. How extraordinary!

Photo special: 'NO LOCALS'

Many places in the UK are unwelcoming to strangers and outsiders, and I've been to my fair share of them. However, before this weekend, I'd never seen anything like this:



Yes, the signs says "NO LOCALS". It adds: "Any locals found playing on our machines will be ask to leave immediately!!" Red capitals and multiple exclamation marks, no less.

Spotted in Caister Holiday Park (near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk). Thanks to Paul for taking the photo for me.

A pint of numbers

Down the pub this evening, one of my colleagues referred to the beer Kronenbourg as 'numbers' - presumably because its full name is 'Kronenbourg 1664'. That's a new one on me.

Photo from Flickr

And Googling 'Kronenbourg' and 'pint of numbers' threw up this nice little anecdote (which I have very gently subbed):

I once worked as a barman and this lad ordered a pint of "numbers" with a male colleague of mine. The barman who was working with me didn't respond to this chap's request. The customer, thinking he had a cool way of ordering his preferred tipple, said: "Haven't you heard of a pint numbers before, pal, what sort of barman are you?" The barman replied: "Yes I have, but we sell 80 Bob as well." Needless to say, the smile was wiped right off his face.

Apparently, 80 Bob a Scottish beer also called 80 Shilling, or sometimes 'Caley 80'. There you go.

A search for subs

Susan Keith, a former newspaper copy editor who now teaches journalism at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is conducting a research project into "the ongoing evolution of newspaper sub editing/copy editing jobs in the English-speaking world".

However Keith appears to be having some difficulty finding subs in the UK, Ireland and South Africa to interview. If you're a current or former newspaper sub in one of these countries, please consider helping her.

Here's a description of the research project, and Susan Keith's contact details.

Keith's search for subs has already been mentioned on John McIntyre's blog You Don't Say, but I thought it bore repeating. And thanks to R Mason for bringing it to my attention.

'Stand up or lay down'

Here's a good example of lie/lay confusion.

I don't want to be too prescriptivist or anything, but most people would agree that the sign should read 'Stand up or lie down...'

I'm not going to go into too much detail about 'lie' and 'lay' because doing so would probably give me flashbacks to my teaching days, but there's some useful information about them on the British Council website.

I took this photo in Croydon last year, as I recall.

Incidentally, I think the rhyme would scan better if the second line read 'Come in and get brown'.

Oh dear, I've just had a flashback to my performance poetry days...

Word of the day: mumpreneur

Here's the front cover of the summer issue of Mums in Control magazine (Sutton, Cheam and Belmont edition).

I'm sharing it with you because one of the coverlines includes the portmanteau 'mumpreneurs'. A mumpreneur is, I'm assuming, someone who is both a mum and an entrepreneur.

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)


Googling 'mumpreneur' gives more than 16,000 results, some of which date back to at least 2007 - so this word is both older and more widely used than I had imagined.

It's also showing little sign of falling out of fashion, as at least two books being published this year have 'mumpreneur' in their title. Exhibit A is The Mumpreneur Diaries: Business, Babies or Bust - One Mother of a Year, by Mosey Jones.



Thanks to our (soon to be former) web editor for bringing Mums in Control and the word 'mumpreneur' to my attention. Incidentally, I agree with him that 'mumtrepreneur' works better as a portmanteau, but sadly it only gets 700 results on Google. It looks like 'mumpreneur' has won the day.