Observations on the world and its inhabitants
I had been working on slop. In previous work I found eleven patterns. Words, lists and stock phrases were caught by scripts. But something kept getting through. Text with no slop words still read like something delivered from a lectern, or as a report when none of that was required. This post will be of ...
Imagine it is 1989. I am sitting before an Amstrad PCW, a cream-coloured machine with a small green screen, a substantial keyboard and a three-inch floppy disk drive. When the disk is accessed, the machine whirs. When the printer begins, it clatters with mechanical determination. I do not think of it as a computer. People ...
This article examines a brief, everyday exchange on a WhatsApp to identify a common cognitive pattern: the treatment of internal, subjective states as if they were objective, external facts, and the use of that false equivalence to justify decisions or behaviours. The analysis draws out key points about the gap between perception and reality, a ...
On 13 May 1997, just two weeks after the general election that swept Tony Blair into power, Jeremy Paxman interviewed the former Home Secretary Michael Howard on BBC Newsnight. The subject was the dismissal of Derek Lewis, the Director General of the Prison Service, following a security breach at Parkhurst prison. The central allegation: that ...
Let’s be honest from the start: by today’s standards, the phrase “you couldn’t swing a cat in there” (or “there’s no room to swing a cat”) sounds pretty grim. It evokes an image of animal cruelty that most of us would rightly find shocking and unacceptable. Yet many people in the UK still trot it ...
Welcome, dear reader, to the golden age of UK healthcare in England & Wales— a time of bold vision, decisive leadership, and the sort of strategic brilliance that can only be achieved when the primary design principle is “do more with less, then do less with less, then pretend it’s more again.” This is ...
What the hell does that mean? It means (obviously) ‘You Do Not Need To Read This Now‘ 😂🤣 Yeah – I’ve been having fun with some mnemonics lately. In this post contains a massive list. When using mnemonics in chat conversations, it’s important to consider your audience and the context of the conversation. Common mnemonics ...
You may not like the evidence. Reality is what it is. Reality doesn’t care what you think or feel about anything! That’s it. I rest my case!
Of some annoyance to me is the different spellings of the same words between the UK and the USA. I’m in the UK and culturally I prefer UK spellings. But it is not that simple. Microsoft Word that is ‘made’ in the USA seems to ‘think’ that it is fine if I spell prioritise as ...
I’m always fascinated to learn new words. When I say ‘new’ I mean words that I did not know or use, or words that I had forgotten about. The following is a recent list, which is being updated as I discover new words: Ham-fisted Bucolic Hagiography Obstreperous Rapscallion Bloviation Skedaddle Sinecure This post is not ...
Some will be reaching for Google and dictionaries on this. Some fine examples of Barnum statements, “Humans a not perfect“, or “Everybody makes mistakes – are you perfect?” or “Not everybody is a scientist.” The words seem to hold a truth held dear by ordinary people. But in essence they lack depth by the way ...
In a previous post, I had reason to conclude that ‘Reading is dead‘. Of course one can read and understand nothing! The social media era has seen a destruction of both reading as a physical act of moving the eyes across the page and decoding words – but also people don’t even understand what words ...
Yes words are cheap. It don’t cost much to say, “I care” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you“. You don’t have to pay to say these sorts of things. It is totally free! And somebody is gonna say ‘obviously’. Well, tough! I’ll say the obvious. I was going to write this blog as ‘What ...
As usual I’ll start with what investment means. Loads of people will have jumped to thinking of £ or $ signs instantly, I just know it. Investment in the context of this post means putting in some effort, time or work and getting some advantage out of it. The advantage could be in monetary terms ...
Right – so I’m at a hotel over a few days for the purposes of work. Yesterday 30th June 2021 around 19:00PM, I asked the receptionist if I could have a small package delivered from Amazon. She said “Yes – no problem I’ll put it on the system“. I saw her type it into the ...
This is England. They speak English over here. It is the national language. I live in England. I grew up speaking English in another land. It is my only language. I then spend over 30 years living in England speaking the English I knew from another land (that was an English colony), but learned some ...
