And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson Page A
Authors: Jeremy Clarkson
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doesn’t.
So why should a club-class passenger be capable of getting to the plane in an hour when people in the back need two? Are airport authorities suggesting that people at the back can’t read direction signs properly and get lost a lot? Are they saying people in thrifty cannot walk past a burger joint without being overwhelmed with a need to stuff their faces with chips? Are we to understand that the less well-off cannot tell the time?
Well, let’s think. It’s always the Darrens and the Julies who have to be paged over the airport PA. And it’s only mouth breathers in football shirts who queue for half an hour for the X-ray machine and then empty their pockets of scissors and daggers. And when was the last time yousaw a businessman fumbling around for his passport after he got to the immigration desk?
I may be on to something here. They want you at the airport two hours early because in Brainless Britain everyone else is too thick to get to the plane any faster.
Perhaps a national IQ standard might be the answer. People from Mensa should be allowed to check in two minutes before the flight goes. Those with worryingly long arms must be there somewhat earlier.
Sunday 22 August 2004
Proper writing is like so overr8ed, innit kids
When asked how he felt about the chaos at Heathrow last week, an American student who had been delayed for 12 hours said: ‘I am so exhausted now, it’s like, “whatever”.’
This is interesting because I went on holiday this year with two 13-year-old girls. Actually no. Let’s be specific about this. I went on a holiday where two 13-year-old girls were present. And one, who had been bombarded with text messages from a would-be suitor, said to the other: ‘It’s like, “whatever”.’
In my daughter’s world almost everything is ‘like, whatever’.
The poor weather is like, whatever. The onset of a new school term is like, whatever. Paula Radcliffe’s 23-mile marathon is like, whatever. Mysteriously, though, Led Zeppelin are so like, cool.
I’m sure your children speak the same way; I’m equally sure they deliver longer sentences in a flat monotone with a scorpion tail of rising inflection at the end.
This unbelievably irritating syntax, I suspect, has been picked up from too many Australian television programmes.
Couple these speech patterns with the ‘like, whatever’ that has come from some exclusively blonde and pink valley in Los Angeles, and we’re left with an odd conclusion. A girl born in London and raised in Oxfordshirehas developed an accent from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Yup, thanks to satellite television, my daughter now speaks Polynesian.
This is not the end of the world because eventually she will grow out of it in much the same way that you and I at some point stopped describing Emerson, Lake and Palmer as ‘far out’ and Goa as ‘groovy’.
What she may not grow out of, however, is her insistence that ‘today’ is spelt with a 2 and that ‘great’ somehow has an 8 in it. This new language has now spilt from the mobile phone into her thank-you letters and homework.
Those of a
Daily Telegraph
disposition believe that txt spk spells the end for proper English and are furious, but really it’s hard to see why.
Think. When pictograms and hieroglyphics were replaced with letters and numbers, did people paint angry drawings in green ink in the caves of Tunbridge Wells, declaring that this new ‘writing’ was the work of the devil? Imagine having to “write” to a newspaper wn you’ve hrd a swllw. How much easier it is to simply draw one.
Throughout history, great men have laboured over the written word, endlessly modifying the letters so they could be transcribed more quickly and read more easily. Nobody, for instance, complained when the Carolingian minuscule came along. They simply used it until they decided Gothic angularity was better. And then they used that.
The alphabet, too, has been endlessly altered to
So why should a club-class passenger be capable of getting to the plane in an hour when people in the back need two? Are airport authorities suggesting that people at the back can’t read direction signs properly and get lost a lot? Are they saying people in thrifty cannot walk past a burger joint without being overwhelmed with a need to stuff their faces with chips? Are we to understand that the less well-off cannot tell the time?
Well, let’s think. It’s always the Darrens and the Julies who have to be paged over the airport PA. And it’s only mouth breathers in football shirts who queue for half an hour for the X-ray machine and then empty their pockets of scissors and daggers. And when was the last time yousaw a businessman fumbling around for his passport after he got to the immigration desk?
I may be on to something here. They want you at the airport two hours early because in Brainless Britain everyone else is too thick to get to the plane any faster.
Perhaps a national IQ standard might be the answer. People from Mensa should be allowed to check in two minutes before the flight goes. Those with worryingly long arms must be there somewhat earlier.
Sunday 22 August 2004
Proper writing is like so overr8ed, innit kids
When asked how he felt about the chaos at Heathrow last week, an American student who had been delayed for 12 hours said: ‘I am so exhausted now, it’s like, “whatever”.’
This is interesting because I went on holiday this year with two 13-year-old girls. Actually no. Let’s be specific about this. I went on a holiday where two 13-year-old girls were present. And one, who had been bombarded with text messages from a would-be suitor, said to the other: ‘It’s like, “whatever”.’
In my daughter’s world almost everything is ‘like, whatever’.
The poor weather is like, whatever. The onset of a new school term is like, whatever. Paula Radcliffe’s 23-mile marathon is like, whatever. Mysteriously, though, Led Zeppelin are so like, cool.
I’m sure your children speak the same way; I’m equally sure they deliver longer sentences in a flat monotone with a scorpion tail of rising inflection at the end.
This unbelievably irritating syntax, I suspect, has been picked up from too many Australian television programmes.
Couple these speech patterns with the ‘like, whatever’ that has come from some exclusively blonde and pink valley in Los Angeles, and we’re left with an odd conclusion. A girl born in London and raised in Oxfordshirehas developed an accent from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Yup, thanks to satellite television, my daughter now speaks Polynesian.
This is not the end of the world because eventually she will grow out of it in much the same way that you and I at some point stopped describing Emerson, Lake and Palmer as ‘far out’ and Goa as ‘groovy’.
What she may not grow out of, however, is her insistence that ‘today’ is spelt with a 2 and that ‘great’ somehow has an 8 in it. This new language has now spilt from the mobile phone into her thank-you letters and homework.
Those of a
Daily Telegraph
disposition believe that txt spk spells the end for proper English and are furious, but really it’s hard to see why.
Think. When pictograms and hieroglyphics were replaced with letters and numbers, did people paint angry drawings in green ink in the caves of Tunbridge Wells, declaring that this new ‘writing’ was the work of the devil? Imagine having to “write” to a newspaper wn you’ve hrd a swllw. How much easier it is to simply draw one.
Throughout history, great men have laboured over the written word, endlessly modifying the letters so they could be transcribed more quickly and read more easily. Nobody, for instance, complained when the Carolingian minuscule came along. They simply used it until they decided Gothic angularity was better. And then they used that.
The alphabet, too, has been endlessly altered to
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