Gear Shift to Shift My Shift

As I have so little to do whilst I am in work, I have decided to use the massive amount of news reading I do for something that is, arguably, useful. At the very least I hope it will help the passing of the hour that is left of my shift. Here’re some of the articles that I have read and found interesting.

All of the articles that feature here are from the BBC website, where I was distraught to find the line: “The operation also had to be speeded up”. My gut reaction to the word ‘speeded’ was one of supreme wrongness. For me, the word clangs in a sentence like a clang-creating device falling heavily into a vault of clang. Probably should have used the klang spelling, then I could have segued into how good the series We Are Klang was, but I won’t, I’ll focus. The more I looked at the word ‘speeded’ the more I worried that I was wrong to assume that the word is non-existent, and so I copy-pasted it into the search box at the top of the screen. Overlooking the fact that my use phrase ‘copy-pasted’ places my criticism into uncertain waters, the amount of times the word ‘speeded’ appeared in BBC articles leads me to believe that this is my personal foible rather than a lexical error.

Uses included:

“its droning bass and melodic hooks mesh with speeded up snake-charmer horn”

“the films have been speeded up so that you can get more miles for your money”

“Then our technical boffins speeded up the footage”

“Researchers spoke to more than 1,500 drivers and found that 94% of them admitted they had speeded.”

Apart from the final use, which I don’t mind because of it’s relation to the term ‘speeding’, which is a fairly recent evolution of the word ‘speed’, I feel as though the writers really should have been using the term ‘sped’. I like the word ‘sped’. Surely it is the correct term to have used in those situations. Regardless, if the term ‘speeded’ is legitimate, then I will be doing my very best to boycott it. Despite the possibility that this blog entry contains more of the term ‘speeded’ than any other, and is going to have ‘speeded’ as one of the tags. The more I discuss it, the hoisting of my own petard is merely being speeded up. Damn.

What is a petard?

One story masquerading as news was the revelation that in the Flintshire Council headquarters in Mold they had renamed a certain foodstuff, re-christening it a ‘Spotted Richard’. According to the article:

“The "spotted" part of the name refers to the currants, which resemble spots, and "Dick" is believed to derive from the word dough.”

Now I’m not really familiar enough with the workings of Old English to speculate on whether or not ‘dough’ can really be linked to ‘dick’. Dough rises. Yeast infection. Throbbing wholemeal breadstick. The article also contained the oft-repeated phrase:

“But one councillor described the move as "political correctness gone mad"”

Of course he/she did. The exciting game of misunderstanding ‘political correctness’ is omnipresent in Britain, and by using my powers of rampant judgemental speculation I can picture the jowls of the councillor wildly flailing as he rings the death knoll of “pritiacrecntssgoma!”. The real reason that name had been changed was that the workers in the canteen had become bored with the occasional sniggers that inevitably follow when a childish person buys spotted dick. I hardly think it warranted a name change however, as spotted dick is one of the ludicrously named things that the British populace become jaded with quite quickly. The pudding makes the foolish mistake of not actually looking like a dick. If it had nailed that one, it would have been the undisputed emperor of inappropriate after-dinner snacks. It loses out to the jammy fanny, which doesn’t exist.

Another councillor, and winner of the Most Obnoxiously Macho Name in History Award, Klaus Armstrong-Braun laid this nugget of wisdom on the debate:

"People make silly comments about everything in life, there is no need to change the name over it."

Exactly, grow up. I expect to have my puddings correctly labelled the next time I go to purchase some spotted penis.

More silly comments were readily forthcoming in an article about what presumptions you can draw about children based on their names. According to the story a survey discovered that:

“Pupils called Callum, Connor, Jack, Chelsea, Courtney and Chardonnay were among some of the ones to watch.”

I tend to believe that judging people on things they have no control over is wrong. The exceptions are race, sex, sexuality and where you come from. During that last statement my tongue was so far in my cheek it exploded out and now my teeth are visible through the bloody gash in the side of my face. Kids have very little control over what they are called, even nicknames are monikers usually allotted to individuals by others, as the lack of children called ‘Captain Awesome’ shows. Judging a child on how tasteless their parents are seems slightly harsh, I would argue that children known to be from worse-off families should be given fair chance to proceed in life, there’s enough prejudice of ‘chavs’ without actively encouraging judging people because of names they had no control over. I shouldn’t be complaining when:

“The survey also asked teachers what the brightest children tended to be called, with Alexander, Adam, Christopher, Benjamin, Edward, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emma, Hannah and Rebecca coming in as the brainiest names.”

My name is Adam, which proves that my critique of the article is valid because clearly I am clever because my name proves it. But by using the opinion of the article to vindicate that I am clever I have proven that the article is correct, which makes my criticism of it incorrect, which proves I am not clever. And universe imploded in a spiral of paradox. Of course it is possible for the article to be incorrect and for me to also be clever. Which is the case.

“Names of the most popular children in the class included Jack, Daniel, Charlie, Callum, Emma, Charlotte, Hannah and Anna.”

Not in my class they weren’t.

Other news sees a discussion of people who have actively changed their names, thus proving them both to be stupid. The divorce of Jordan/Katie Price and Peter Andre/Peter Andrea has gone through successfully. It would seem hypocritical to criticise people because of their names after speaking out about that very thing, though clearly these individuals saw some inadequacy in their own names, and it is the choice I am scrutinising, not them. In Jordan/Katie Price’s case I imagine is was glamour/privacy reasons that fuelled her choice back in the day, though privacy and glamour don’t usually go hand in hand. It is for aesthetic reasons that Peter Andre must have dropped the ‘a’ from the end of his name. Still, the husband with a woman’s name, the wife with a man’s name, it’s not surprising they didn’t last. The reason actually given, however, can be discovered as:

“It was revealed the pair had both applied for a divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour.”

So luckily that clears that up. The divorce goes through:

“with neither party accepting blame for the split.”

It seems strange to me that it is necessary to accept blame in a divorce, or indeed provide a reason more pressing than “I don’t want to be married to you anymore”. What a strange and outdated system marriage is. I will be boycotting it henceforth, which I’m sure will cause global outrage, as the removal of a spotted dick obsessive should.

That is surely the only pudding that, with the help of the humble comma, can become an explanation of a picture of a celebrity.

Spotted, dick.