Monday Moan 62

 

GIBBERISH ON THE AIRWAVES

One of the problems with the proliferation of channels available these days is that the airwaves are now full of people who don’t appear to understand what it is that they are saying.  Without wishing to sound like a pedant, the frequent misuse of language is driving me mad.  Listen any day of the week for more than a short while and you will hear something that initially might sound right (as it must have done to the person saying it) but in fact is wrong for one reason or another.

 

For example, last week we had Lindsey German, spokesperson for the Stop the War Coalition telling us that “the honest truth is that …..”, presumably so that we were not confused into thinking that was she was saying was, in  fact, “the dishonest truth”.  

 

Sports commentators seem to be particularly prone to this kind of verbal nonsense. Yesterday we had two of them agreeing that “Columbia and Belgium will be most people’s dark horses for the next World Cup”.  Now call me old-fashioned, but I thought that a ‘dark horse’ was someone unknown or unfancied who came to prominence or to achieve success when nobody expected it.  How can Columbia and Belgium be ‘dark horses’ if they are being tipped by everyone?

 

And later, in a different sports programme, we had the classic misuse of ‘under or over-estimate’.  Apparently, “you cannot under-estimate what it would mean to Arsenal supporters to win this fixture …”.  

 

Well yes, actually, you can. But you shouldn’t.

 

 

 

 

IT’S JUST TOO MUCH EFFORT

The rash of summer music festivals is almost over for 2013 – and the task of clearing up the rubbish left behind by people who cannot be bothered to clear up after themselves will continue for some time to come.  The pictures from the recent Reading Festival were fairly typical.

 

But this is not a problem specific to Festivals, much less to the sorts of people who go to such events.  It’s actually a symptom of the wider malaise affecting society. Look around you and you will see smaller scale examples of the same kind of behaviour wherever you look. 

 

Last week, for example, there were the shopping trolleys left where they were emptied, rather than being returned to the designated collection point; the newspapers left on trains rather than being put in the bins or taken away; the person who emptied their pockets of rubbish whilst standing in a queue for a bus and then walk to the side of the pavement to leave it there, rather than find a rubbish bin, put it in the bin on the bus, or take it home. 

 

And then there was my visit to our local hospital.

 

 

 

There was a water dispenser located in the corner of the waiting room and it was obvious that a number of people had managed to haul themselves up from the chairs, drag themselves the 3 metres or so over to the water, operate the complicated mechanism to extract water from the dispenser, hobble back to their seats and then consume the water they had transported across that great distance.  Equally, it was clear that the physical effort involved in doing all of that had left them exhausted, such that they couldn’t manage the shorter journey over to the rubbish bin to throw away their empty water cups.  No doubt they were conserving their energy for the much longer journeys that would be necessary to get to the consulting rooms and then back to their cars once they had seen the medical staff.  

 

Or perhaps they were just too lazy to get up and dispose of their rubbish.  People sometimes say we live in throwaway society.  Maybe we should call that a throwaway-wherever-you-like-and-expect-someone-else-to-clear-it-up society?

 

 

 

 

SHOCK TRANSFER NEWS?

I fell asleep yesterday evening and woke during the BBC News to see Andre Villas-Boas peering at me from the screen from the Arsenal interview suite.  In a moment of pure panic I thought this was the shock transfer news that Arsenal had been promising all summer – a new manager rather than a new player.  Fortunately, once I had woken properly, my fears were unfounded and Arsene Wenger had not signed AVB after all. 

 

In the most predictable of all the summer’s transfers, AVB was just confirming that Gareth Bale had become the most ludicrously over-priced footballer of all time, with Real Madrid spending £85m on the transfer fee, and paying Bale £300k a week in wages.

 

Tottenham, of course, were committed to the deal the moment they started to buy virtually an entirely new team over the summer – spending around £110m on transfer fees before Bale had been sold.  

 

No doubt most Tottenham supporters will consider this to be money well spent.  After all, they were able to celebrate losing only 1-0 to Arsenal (summer outlay of zero prior to the game) yesterday, rather suffer another of the 5-2 thrashings they had endured in each of the two previous seasons.  A sound £110m investment I reckon.