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Google search: the naked truth
2008-02-28 17:20:00
One of the unexpected pleasures of writing a blog is discovering the strange Google searches that direct visitors to your posts.In the past few weeks I have written one post about the terms 'fire truck' and 'fire engine' and another about a possibly inappropriate Children's Society campaign featuring a naked Sophie Ellis-Bextor.Imagine my amusement when I discovered that visitors are now finding the blog via the Google search 'naked on a fire truck'. I do hope they're not disappointed.And I was going to take a screengrab of this particular search to see exactly where The Engine Room comes – but seeing as I am at work it might take some explaining to the IT department should they be paying attention...
More About: Truth , Search , Google Search

Avoid consuming odorous cuisine at Barclays
2008-02-27 15:31:00
An Engine Room regular (and Barclays Bank employee) has e-mailed us with the following:I was amused by a weekly work email that asks us to "be mindful of your fellow colleagues and avoid consuming odorous cuisine at your desks". What's wrong with 'avoid eating smelly food'?I also enjoyed the last line of the email: "Please show consideration to colleagues with disabilities and use the general toilet facilities whenever they are available." I'm getting fed up with using the toilet constantly and I'm not sure it's helping my disabled colleagues much anyway!
More About: Cuisine , Avoid

Visitor Oyster card 'never runs out'
2008-02-26 15:16:00
Most people who have spent any time in London in the past few years will be aware of Oyster cards, small plastic cards which can be loaded with money and used to pay for travel on the capital's public transport system.Yesterday's free London paper Metro carried a story about Visitor Oyster cards – much like regular Oysters but available at coach ticket offices throughout the UK, "which allows coach travellers to buy their Oyster card before they even arrive in the capital".The story continues:The Visitor Oyster card comes pre-loaded with pay as you go and is ready for passengers to use as soon as they arrive in central London.The pay as you go money on the card never runs out so people can use any money left over for future visits to London or pass it to friends and family visiting the capital.The money never runs out? Brilliant – free transport for ever. Sadly, judging by the rest of par I think the reporter means 'expires' rather than 'runs out'...And don't get me start...
More About: Card , Runs

Google: fit truckers
2008-02-15 17:03:00
One of our reporters just showed me that if you search for "fit truckers" in Google it asks you whether you mean "fat truckers". Looks like the search engine is finally developing sentience...
More About: Truckers

Malapropisms: mother cuddled
2008-02-14 15:29:00
We've had an email from a 'secret admirer' (well, it is Valentine's day). She says:I heard a good Smithism (or malapropism) the other day: a friend at work referred to somebody as having been mother cuddled as a child. I think the word he was looking for was mollycoddled!Very nice.But I wonder whether there is a connection between 'cuddled' and the 'coddled' of mollycoddled. The Concise OED says on coddle: C16, origin uncertain; in the sense 'treat in an indulgent or overprotective way', is probably a dialect variant of caudle (obsolete), 'administer invalids' gruel'.On cuddle, all it says is: C16, of unknown origin. So I wouldn't be surprised if they were cognates. Anyone know?
More About: Mother

Portmanteaux: safe-tergent, Britishstani
2008-02-13 16:00:00
Following JD's reference to portmanteau words, here are a couple I encountered last night.First, from a TV ad for a soap powder called Woolite (pictured right) is safe-tergent - for which the copywriter responsible should have his/her knuckles rapped.But rather more interesting was the portmanteau coined during a BBC Radio 4 feature by a Brit whose grandparents came to the UK from Pakistan. Feeling equally alienated from his family's culture and 'mainstream' British culture, he referred to himself as Britishstani.Not a portmanteau but a neologism that I predict we'll hear more of comes from the illustrious lips of our Prime Minister, who told Radio 4 listeners: "I've always been an Atlanticist". Meaning, I assume, that he takes great stock in the UK's 'special relationship' with our English-speaking cousins across the Pond.What our non-English-speaking cousins across the Channel and North Sea will think of this westward gaze we can well imagine.
More About: Safe

Acronyms: my company is ASS
2008-02-13 14:59:00
House style at the publication I work for is to shorten long, multi-word company names to an acronym after first use (if possible). For example, 'Jonathan Smithson International' will be called 'Jonathan Smithson International (JSI)' on first use and after that just 'JSI'. This saves space, is easier to read and reduces the risk of typos.Today I was subbing a story about a firm called Appropriate Scaffolding Services and was just about to shorten its name to an acronym when I realised that referring to it as 'ASS' throughout the feature possibly wouldn't be appreciated by its directors.... although it might have given readers on both sides of the Atlantic a chuckle.
More About: Company

Can a building be 'based' somewhere?
2008-02-12 15:21:00
Free London paper Metro today carries a news story with an interesting boxout on the 'Diamond Light Microscope'. It starts:This building, based in Oxfordshire is a giant microscope and is as big as five football pitches. It can produce the brightest light in the known universe – 10billion times brighter than the Sun.No, I'm not going to talk today about the use of commas, or about proper nouns. Instead I want to ask: is it possible for a building to be 'based' somewhere?People, businesses and organisations can be 'based' somewhere, using that base as a "centre of operations" (OED). But buildings? Surely there are 'located', 'situated', or just 'are'.Of course Metro could have steered clear of verbs entirely, and simply written "This Oxfordshire building" or "This building in Oxfordshire"...
More About: Building

Word of the day: stagflation
2008-02-11 16:09:00
The American Dialect Society recently chose 'subprime' as their word of the year, and on a similar note I think 'stagflation' is a word we'll be hearing more of in the next 12 months.A portmanteau (blend) of 'stagnation' and 'inflation', as you might imagine it describes a situation when inflation is high but the economy is stagnant. The word has been around since the 1960s, and the phenomenon occurred throughout the world in the 1970s, but I'd never heard of it until recently.I particularly like it because it makes me think of those giant inflatable reindeer that people put outside their houses at Christmas – see picture.The Wikipedia page on stagflation is informative, but heavy reading if you're not really well up on macroeconomics.
More About: Word , Stagflation , Word of the Day

End of an error – or, goodbye Apus
2008-02-08 13:46:00
So it is Apus' last day in the engine room – although not here in our online Engine Room – and we have completed the ceremonial handing over of the OED and the ceremonial eating of the doughnuts.As Apus said yesterday, he will keep blogging from his island retreat on what I hope will be a regular basis. The blog was originally Apus' idea, which I hijacked, and it wouldn't be the same without him.However we are gaining two new recruits to the desk, the first of whom has already joined us, and I am hopeful that one or both of them might contribute to the blog as well. One of our designers has even threatened to write something, so watch this space.I'd also like to say that, in the real world, Apus has been the Chief Sub to my Sub, and due to a staff restructure will be the last Chief Sub our publication is likely to have. That seems fitting. It's always good to go out on a high.Thanks for everything, comrade.Look carefully, and you might spot Apus. Lucky bugger.
More About: Error , Goodbye

Scion of Cerberus
2008-02-07 16:11:00
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&LsBy 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!
More About: Scion

Headline: Diligent Bankers' present in Budapest
2008-02-07 14:14:00
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 t...
More About: Present , Headline

I think I need to micturate
2008-02-06 20:27:00
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 micturition ‘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, I occurs to me that an erroneous vertically delinated 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
2008-02-06 20:02:00
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 eachother 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 aspirat...
More About: Bombs

Phobias: fear of long words
2008-02-06 13:30:00
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:Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalioph obia — 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 T...
More About: Words , Fear , Long , Phobias

Idioms: cut the mustard
2008-02-05 14:09:00
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.
More About: Idioms

Double meanings: baby bits
2008-02-04 12:54:00
Seen on our work intranet:Baby bits for saleI hope this is referring to toys, clothes, cots and such because otherwise it's just disturbing.Hey, journo, leave those kids alone
More About: Double , Meanings , Bits

Learn your roots: verbiage
2008-02-01 17:22:00
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.
More About: Roots , Learn

Channel 4: Embarrassing Illnesses
2008-02-01 14:54:00
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 g...
More About: Channel 4

Collective nouns: subs and designers
2008-01-31 14:01:00
As you may be aware, Apus is soon leaving for pastures new and he is currently enjoying a round of leaving dos.Yesterday it was the turn of our esteemed freelancers to be taken to lunch – and I thought at the time that never before had I seen so many subs in one place. That led me to wonder what a good collective noun for a group of sub editors (or copy editors, if you prefer) might be. A proof of subs, perhaps? A correction of subs?I don't want to leave our design colleagues out, so perhaps we should come up with a collective noun for them too. A scribble of designers? A scrawl of designers?I'm sure your ideas will be better than mine...
More About: Designers , Collective , Subs

Childhood memories: Sophie Ellis-Bextor naked
2008-01-30 13:19:00
UK charity The Children's Society has launched a campaign to gather "hundreds and thousands of childhood memories that will contribute the Good Childhood Inquiry, the UK’s first independent inquiry into what makes a good childhood. This will help us understand how to make childhood better today."Fair enough, but to promote the campaign the charity has photographed elfin pop singer Sophie Ellis -Bextor naked in a tonne of multi-coloured 'hundreds and thousands' sprinkles (pictured).Does this strike anyone else as slightly inappropriate? I assume the charity would want to associate childhood with wholesomeness and innocence – not virtues that the promotional photos really convey to me.I'm not complaining too strongly, mind.
More About: Sophie Ellis Bextor , Memories

Feeling puntillious: Shakespeare
2008-01-29 10:11:00
This post was a race between my esteemed colleague and me as the following snippet, culled from a column in New Scientist magazine, was sent to both of us by a fellow galley slave in the adjacent engine room:Sign spotted at a camping shop in Beverley, East Yorkshire: "Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents". No doubt they're designed to withstand a Tempest – as long as the guy ropes are nice and Titus Andronicus.PS: What did the barman at the Globe say when Will Shakespeare misbehaved? "You're barred!" Homophonic levity... JD will be impressed.
More About: Feeling

Phabulous frases
2008-01-28 17:45:00
Here are a few phrases that have brightened up life in the Engine Room over the past few days – all from our charges, who never seem to notice that JD and I have made any changes to their prose. Which is as it should be, of course… I mean, why should a sub (or copy editor) mind that we do the work and they get the awards? At least it's never made me bitter."it is, so far, the first of its kind""imminent in the near future""orders were worth nearly £12.7bn in value""registrations are up by 76% year on year compared with last year""the plight of a midlands company hangs in the balance"

Webcams in the workplace
2008-01-28 14:47:00
Slightly off-topic, perhaps, but here goes:Today I discovered that the company Apus and I work for has set up two webcams in our building: one in the staff restaurant, and one in the coffee shop franchise on the ground floor.The feed can be viewed live via the company intranet, although is only by chance that I came across the link to do this: it hasn't been advertised at all. And it is intranet only, I'm afraid, so I can't give you the link.But in effect this means I can sit at my desk, subbing copy, and spy on my workmates as they buy a latte or eat a sandwich. The truth of this has already been brought home to me: as I returned to my desk this lunchtime after buying a cup of soup in the staff restaurant, a colleague whom I had earlier told about the webcams remarked that I had been a "bit heavy on the croutons".Trivial stuff, but slightly disturbing nonetheless. If nothing else, it lets my line manager see whether I really am 'just popping downstairs to get some more milk'. ...
More About: Workplace , Webcams

Fire engine, fire truck, fire brigade vehicle
2008-01-25 14:56:00
I was subbing some copy recently that used the uncomfortable phrase "fire brigade vehicle". I changed this almost automatically to "fire engine" but then started wondering whether I'd done the right thing. Two issues were on my mind:1. 'Fire engine' might be a totally or predominantly British English phrase. The Concise OED doesn't say so, although Googling 'fire engine' throws up a suspiciously high proportion of UK pages. I know that Americans might refer to a 'fire truck' but I don't know what the difference in usage is between 'fire truck' and 'fire engine' Stateside. 'Fire truck' doesn't appear in my Concise at all.(Of course, the publication I work for is aimed at a British readership so really this isn't a big factor, but it's still interesting – and might explain why the writer shied away from using 'fire engine' in the first place.)2. I don't know enough to say, but it could be that "fire brigade vehicle" is a more general term than "fire engine", cov...
More About: Truck , Vehicle , Engine

Malapropisms: execrators
2008-01-24 12:26:00
Roz has emailed us the following job advert which contains a "lovely malapropism":Opportunities exist for skilled people to undertake roles within the Mining industry in Regional WA. Our company is currently seeking individuals who have the following abilities: Machine operation tickets such as Dump Trucks, Execrators, 992 Loaders, Drills Graders, Dozers and Water Karts with 6 wheels and also able to undertake a Manager or Supervisory role.Roz adds: "For much of the day thereafter, I daydreamed about what it would be like to actually be paid for cursing mine sites..."(We seem to be having a glut of malapropisms recently. For anyone not in the know, a malapropism is "the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one" (OED). The term itself comes from the character Mrs Malaprop in an 18th-century play. Hence the title of Apus' blog post the other day...)

Prehistoric giant salamander!
2008-01-23 14:44:00
Free London paper Metro recently published an article about the Zoological Society of London's Edge project – which seeks to protect 'evolutionary distinct and globally endangered' species.The print version of the story carried the following caption (you'll have to imagine the pictures here, I'm afraid):Freak show: Some of the creatures on the Edge list – the olm (top), a blind amphibian which hunts using electric pulses; the Chinese giant salamander, a pre-historic creature (left); Darwin's frog (below left); and the Gardiner's Seychelles frog, which is smaller than a fingernailDisregarding the hyphen, why refer to the giant salamander as prehistoric? The OED says 'prehistoric' is "of or relating to prehistory", 'prehistory' being "the period of time before written records". So this particular species predates writing – which has been with us for around 5,000 years. In evolutionary terms, that's not long at all.The OED does give a second definition of prehistoric...
More About: Giant , Prehistoric , Salamander

Here's to Mrs Malaprop!
2008-01-22 17:26:00
Following JD's reference to a Dutch correspondent's use of "exceedings", here's a malapropism that made me smile from an English writer who should know better:It’s led to a shortage of 12 to 36-month-old vehicles, exasperated by people holding on to them.Yes, of course the author meant "exacerbated", but as written doesn't this sentence paint a wonderful picture of exasperated vehicles desperate to find new homes?

Noise exceedings
2008-01-21 10:48:00
One of our regular contributors is a Dutch writer who certainly speaks English much better than I will ever speak Dutch. However English not being his native language he occasionally employs an unusual – albeit charming – turn of phrase. Recently, in a piece about a trial of noise-reducing technology, he wrote:no more than five complaints on noise exceedings followedI think that is just lovely. "Don't make any noise exceedings, you'll disturb the neighbours..."
More About: Noise

Palm visible on Google Earth shock
2008-01-18 15:30:00
Today I was planning to write about a BBC News story on a species of giant palm recently discovered in Madagascar. The reason I chose this particular story was because it described the palm as being 'so large it could be seen by satellite', or something to that effect. Odd, because I know you can see quite small things by satellite – certainly things much smaller than a reasonably sized palm.However, when I went back to the BBC News site to check the story today, I found that the offending copy had been rewritten to remove any mention of satellites. Just when I was thinking that I would have to come up with a new subject to write about, I spotted that one of the captions read:The palm is said to be so big it can be seen on Google Earth Brilliant! I have three problems with this. Firstly, I've checked on Google Earth and it is quite possible to make out the sunroof on the car parked outside my flat – not a very large object at all. Admittedly the satellite coverage of Madagasca...
More About: Shock , Palm