The English language has a few really shit features I’m surprised it ever caught on. well, I suppose since the english ruled half the planet at one time a lot of people didn’t really have a choice. The 2 I want to berate today are the concept of context only words, and the use of “ough”.
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That reminds me of the first time I heard the phrase “I’m not black, I’m African American”

Those of you who know me will know that I don’t really listen to every word that is said in a sentence so I can multi task quite effectively, however before I honed the skill my brain would fill in the gaps with words that were topical for whatever reason… this tended to lead to some pretty interesting selective hearing issues.

It was my second or so trip to the good ole U.S of A and after a 7 hour flight in cattle class I was somewhat jet-lagged. Standing in the immigration line I heard a woman shout “I’m not black, if I can I’ll marry Ken”

A couple of things occurred to me, first, who the hell is Ken, and by the way lady, you are black - I’m English and on our forms … oh, African American!!!

It was the people being beheaded, it was their fault, they got in the way of the guillotine blade.

You can imagine the branding board. Hmm, if we blame the fishermen for the death of the dolphins, we’d have to do something about it, I know, lets blame the tuna for the way people hunt it.

Besides, all canned tuna is dolphin friendly… well, unless you throw a can actually at a dolphin, but generally a small chunk of a dead fish cannot hurt a dolphin - oh, sorry, I forgot, there is the choke hazard as well.

There is another interesting angle. Apart from all the turtles and other porpoises that are being caught instead of dolphins, what about the over farming of tuna itself. Tuna is being caught in unsustainably high numbers that soon we will have no tuna left to be friendly to dolphins with. What we need is tuna friendly tuna. It’s probably a good job Linda McCartney is dead or we would probably have more sawdust based products filling our shelves.

Hey, no dolphins were hurt in the writing of this item so that makes it dolphin friendly to.

Whatever the hell next! While I agree that a lot of so called ‘British born and bred’ types need help with their mother tongue, I cannot believe this news item made the BBC!!!

Back from holiday and I’m already becoming agitated! I want fewer of these crap damit!

Well, I thought I would revisit the turn of phrase camp pretty soon, didn’t realise that I would be bashing it because its being used to protect iddy biddy kiddies though. (more…)

Ihe world is a constantly evolving place, and yet political correctness takes a while to catch up. For instance calling someone a "Joey" back in my day was seen as the height of controversy, now once again, and quite rightly, the world has moved on and this term generally only refers to an infant marsupial.

 Now, we are not allowed to be prejudice in case we offend someone, but what the F!! (more…)

So, "Man-flu" that’s a poor attempt at mild ccough, but "bird-flu", well, that can kill.

Funny how the world works.

In common use it generally refers to a generic non-measurement of any kind in a similar vein to “widgets”, however it is actually a speed.

The barleycorn was used as a measurement of length in early Anglo-Saxon times, now, generally accepted as one third of an inch.

Therefore your average person walks at approximately 127,733,760 barleycorns per fortnight.

2 miles per hour
== 10,560 feet per hour
== 126,720 inches per hour
== 380,160 barleycorns per hour
== 9,123,840 barleycorns per day
== 63,866,880 barleycorns per week
== 127,733,760 barleycorns per fortnight

And, to answer the question

A barleycorn per fortnight is 3.91439 × 10^-9 mph

Interestingly, a poppy seed is a quarter of a barleycorn.

Your buddy has a car accident and ends up in surgery - which goes well given the ruptured splein, punctured lung and haemothorax. The doctor surgeon comes out afterwards and says that your mate is stable but that they did “loose a lot of blood in surgery”. (more…)