This one comes from 12 June 2014, since when it has amassed no fewer than five views, so don’t talk to me about going viral. It is a perhaps useful insight into the mind of a still unrepentant grammar pedant. Laying Down The Law You may have seen that the State opening of Parliament took…
Bloganuary Day 26: get a grip, WordPress. What is your favourite part about yourself? It looks like whoever comes up with these daily prompts for Bloganuary is getting as weary of the exercise as many of the participants probably are – myself included. It certainly doesn’t help when we get fed nonsense like today. What…
Bloganuary Day 8: Finally, a chance for a rant… What do you like most about your writing? I spent most of my working life writing for a living. As an investment analyst, the constant churning out of ‘reports’ was what I was supposed, and paid, to do. I like to think that I was quite…
Bloganuary Day 7: okay, I think I’ve got this… What makes you laugh? Just as our musical preferences tend to become established by our late teens, so I think it is with our tastes in humour. As a teenager in the late sixties and early seventies, in comedy terms I grew up largely on a…
Oh WordPress, you shouldn’t have got me started. A recent Daily Prompt asked about punctuation. In particular, it asked ‘do you overuse exclamation marks? Do you avoid semicolons like the plague? What type of punctuation could you never live without?’ Like it says on Wikipedia, punctuation is: “the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical…
You have no idea how much of a struggle it’s been not to start this post with the word ‘So’. For that is our subject today, dear reader. More particularly, the increasingly pervasive practice of begiinning sentences with this poor, innocent syllable. To borrow another common modern usage: WTF? This has been going on for years now,…
You may have seen that the State opening of Parliament took place last week. This is when Her Majesty blocks the traffic in central London to go to the House of Lords and deliver ‘the Queen’s Speech’. This homily – not written by the Queen herself, of course, – essentially sets out what the government plans…
the only deadhead in the hameau 