Saturday, May 28, 2011

BBC English

Is it just me, or is the BBC (at least the online branch of it) completely losing its grip on English usage? On the current cucumber e-coli scare in Europe, it says:
The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were infected with a severe complication of E.coli called hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).
Surely cucumbers can't be infected with such a syndrome? Isn't it rather that contaminated cucumbers have caused people to become infected with it (or more correctly, that they have caused people to become infected with the strain of e-coli that is associated with it, so that those people have then developed the syndrome itself)? Otherwise, wouldn't we be treating the cucumbers instead of the people?

As if the headline wasn't bad enough - "Deadly Cucumbers Claim More Lives." It sounds like something from an episode of The X-Files.

I've been relying on the BBC website for my daily news for years now. Recently I've started paying for the New York Times online, though - it seems to have much higher standards (not to mention a nice blog where one of the news editors monitors and discusses language errors in the published paper).

It's bad enough having to read all of these student papers with "loose" for lose, "then" for "than" (or is it "than" for "then"? In any case, for a large number of my students the two are pronounced just the same, so it's easy to understand why they get confused) and "effect" for "affect," without having to see the BBC let such careless writing pass too. It makes me wonder why I bother.

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I wrote them a "comment" about it through a form on the BBC site, and today it reads:
The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were contaminated with E.coli which left people ill with hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).
Was it because of me? Or a wave of dissenting voices? I don't know.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

New Term

The new term is upon us. I am horribly overloaded, since they canceled one of my courses last term and I had to propose a new cancel-proof course for this term to make it up, added to my normal load. It needed to draw a good audience, and it did. A full class today, more people than I could quite focus on - though that was probably more to do with the weird classroom set up than actual numbers. I walked in to find a huge room with vaulted ceiling and windows filling one end, like a 1970s Methodist church, and students packed round tables pushed into a large square - so that I had to move numbers of them before I could even have a front of class to stand in. Throughout the class I felt as if I was stuck in Da Vinci's Last Supper done over in the style of Bruegel and then photographed by Gursky.