Font's and apos's: who cares anyway?

I wish it didn't irritate me that people use the word font when they mean typeface (for which Microsoft is probably largely to blame). But it's as pointless as getting worked up about apostrophes.

(On a stall in Dorchester yesterday there were some flowers which it appeared had been reserved for Big Lily.)

(A current roadworks sign in Weymouth has LORRYS TURNING. Presume they mean LORRY'S.)

Some people think all the apostrophe stuff represents a recent slide in education. Back in the Sixties, though, I remember admiring the new signs on the premises of C CHAPLIN MOTOR’S in Southend.

C Chaplin Motor… a funny name for someone in the used car trade.

All over before it started

After that England-Montenegro game, there is time now for some sober reflection on the issues, the most pressing of which is:

The national anthems.

Montenegro's... a belter! It sounded like the soundtrack to a Hollywood thriller about espionage. A shame, of course that it couldn't have been played by Hugo Montenegro and his Orchestra. (That reference may not mean much to the younger reader, whoever he or she might be.)

And what did we have?  As usual, the dirge about God saving our gracious queen. What a bunch of crap. No wonder our gallant boys sometimes struggle a bit for inspiration.

Found in translation

I'm sure we all derive some interest from reading the tributes paid to people in the press after they've gone.

They do often need some interpretation. I think I might start compiling a guide to the terms used.

The phrase a free spirit, for instance, usually signals the passing of an individual without any sense of social or personal obligation, on whom no one could ever rely for anything.

Lived life to the full can often usefully be translated as rarely sober.

Thanks to John Medd (below) for identifying that close relation of the free spirit, the maverick. John's definition: someone who didn't give a flying f**k about anything or anybody.

And to Will Birch for he never married - the interpretation of which requires no great imaginative leap on the part of any reader.

Does anyone else have any contributions? It'll take me years to remember them all myself...

Crating an impression

Whole lot of crating going on these days on the TV and radio. One first noticed it in the run-up to the General Election, when Nick Clegg was talking about crating things. Now it’s Milliband.

If they mean creating, whey don’t they say creating? Is it a status thing, like pronouncing medicine medsun?