Soft in the Head

HARD WATER IS APTLY NAMED; LIFE IS VERY HARD FOR PEOPLE LIVING IN HARD WATER AREAS, SUCH AS LONDON.

Those poor folk have a problem getting a lather in the bath, and it is a real challenge to get clothes clean. Central heating furs up. Toilet cisterns and kettles soon fill up with mineral deposits, so tea and coffee taste strange — and no-one drinks from the tap!

As a result, these unfortunate people have to buy bottled water to drink. Because most of the UK’s population lives in hard water areas, the big chain stores cater for them by selling bottled water, water for car batteries, water for ironing, and other things like salt for dishwashers and products that attack lime scale.

It is perhaps no surprise that national TV advertising is chock-full of products aimed at making a hard life easier. What is surprising, though, is that the power of advertising is so strong that Scottish people are buying these products, even though they don’t have to!

I have seen — with my own eyes — people buying bottled water at the supermarket — water to drink! Water that is of poorer quality, officially, than the water running out of their Glaswegian taps!

Look around at the shelf space given over to products that we do not need here in Glasgow — limescale remover? (yet people buy it). We do not need to put salt in our dishwasher, we can fill our car battery straight from the tap, we get a good lather in the bath, so we do not need special shampoos and bubble baths (and we can use less)! Laundry is a cinch — we can use steam irons, filled straight from the tap, laundry powder? — we can wash at 30 degrees using the cheapest make of soap powder on the market. We can buy the cheapest brands of toilet cleaner, we don’t need to dose our central heating, and we have no bother with kettles or septic tanks.

Life is easy in a soft water area as a result. If only more Scots, and more Glaswegians, knew just and appreciated how important this resource is, how cheap and easy it is to live here.

Then again, there are a lot of dafties who see the adverts and go buy water to do the ironing! Jings!

MIND BLOWING?

IF MY MIND DOES NOT “BLOW”, is this a breach of the Trades Descriptions Act?

The sign on the community notice board inside Shawlands Shopping Centre states:

 

“THE KIOSK
Now Open
Bigger & Better
than before
More variety
At prices that are
MIND BLOWING”

Please click on the picture to enlarge.

This also begs the questions (1) is a “mind blowing price” cheap or expensive? Good or bad? and (2) Is having one’s mind blown something one ought to desire?

Glasgow Shop’s Apostrophic Grammar!

BAD GRAMMAR IN PUBLIC NOTICES IS GETTING WORSE WHEN THE NOTICES ARE HANDWRITTEN. However, the problem is not merely confined to the handwritten; look at the shop front is the picture (click to enlarge).

This is an employment agency’s shop front. The entire window is an advertisement billboard, they are seeking (sic):-

• Joiner’s
• Plumber’s
• Electrician’s
• Labourer’s
• Cleaner’s
• Lineworker’s

This is a bizarre example of misuse of the apostrophe. One would think that someone would have told them by now, but it has been like this for ages. Perhaps people do not realise the problem.
Things are getting worse.

Pronounced E

WE NEED TO IMPROVE OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM.

The misuse and abuse of the poor apostrophe is nothing when compared with the widespread mispronunciation of “ae”.

When the letter “a” is joined with the letter “e”, the resulting sound is a long “e”. It is that simple. It is not sounded like a capital “A” (as in “hay” or “day”).

Examples:

Caesar (ceezar), encyclopaedia (en-sigh-klo-peed-ee-ah), paedophile (pee-doh-file), paediatrics (peed-ee-ah-trix), haemoglobin (hee-mo-globe-in), daemon (dee-mon).

A common example of common mispronunciation is Aerial (ee-ree-al). Scottish is perhaps the worst for this, for gaelic should be “gee-lik” not “gay-lik”.

The most annoying examples are found when people try to represent Glaswegian with a Scottish tool.

To do — do is pronounced “day” in Glasgow, but it is very often written as “dae” — which would be pronounced “dee” — which reveals it’s Scottish origins (it sounds more Dundonian to say dee for day) . This is probably due to the comic strips originating in Dundee, especially “Oor Wullie” and “The Broons”. Try reading them afresh, but pronounce the “ae” correctly — as in Dundee and not as in Glasgow, it will become clear that “dae” is indeed “dee” and not “day”.

Long have the Scots been annoyed by the English mispronouncing “loch” as “lok”. Now take the “ch” sound and soften it or quieten it down. The resulting sound was written down as “qu”.

So “qu” sounds like “ch” — but less wet, and more whispery — or more to the front of the tongue than the back.

Thus the word “quine” would be said, starting with a soft loch “ch” sound — yet I am always hearing people say “kwine”! The word “quine” is closer the word for child, “wean” (pronounced “wane”), than people seem to realise. The best way to pronounce Scottish words provided by the likes of Sir David Lyndsay and Robert Burns, is to abandon Glaswegian and embrace Scotland — the softer sing-song tones of Inverness and the highlands, or the lilts of the borders.

When reading “Oor Wullie” or “The Broons”, a Dundonian accent is required — not a Glaswegian one! Burns did not write for the Glasgow tongue. Malky the cartoonist mispelled back in the 70s, and now it’s “Still Game” and “Chewing The Fat” that compounds the error; “Gonnae no dae that” is what I see written, but as it is said “Gonny no day that” rather than “Gonee no dee that” the problem is clear: there is a long tradition of writing Scots, but there is no such tradition for writing Glaswegian — and so Glaswegians are taking the Scots spellings and mispronouncing them on the basis of a hard “ch” and the mistaken idea that “ae” is pronounced “hay”.

Things are Getting Worse.

More Apostrophe Abuse

MORE APOSTROPHE ABUSE ABUSE IN A PUBLIC NOTICE.

Tesco Takes The Cake

POLLOK SUPERMARKET CANNOT SPELL WELL.

I was having a nosy around Tesco’s Silverburn flagship store recently when I was stopped in my tracks by the following sight:

Can you believe this? I was gob-smacked! Obviously it should have stated “You’re The Best” — but that’s not what stuns me, it is the fact that this is a ’special’ cake (for a birthday), that it is for a 50 year old (who would certainly notice the spelling error), that it is proudly on display as a best example of the quality that can be produced by the in-store cake decorators and bakers, that it is in the supermarket chain’s newest, biggest and best store in the entire country, that no-one checks the product, and finally that no-one checks the displays either. Wow! Things are definitely getting worse!