Performer, artist, poet, schmoet

Poet Paula Claire has made a controversial exit from the Oxford Professor of Poetry “competition” on the grounds that it’s become curiouser and curiouser. First they didn’t process her application, then they called here a performer and artist, then they processed a heap of further applications.

So how important is it whether you’re called poet or performer?

On the Today programme, Paula Claire was asked why is it such a big deal what they called her. It’s clear she feels that calling her an artist, when the five male candidates were all called poets, was taking poetic licence a stanza too far.

Does it really matter? Well yes. There is probably an element of what Evan Davis described as “paperwork cock-up” in the application process, but there’s also more than a whiff of good old-fashioned, “don’t the ladies look lovely in their hats”. True, Paula Claire’s argument that people will have been downloading inaccurate information about her on to their mobile phones, is slightly precious – surely they’ll only have done that if they’re really interested in the whole thing and therefore will already know she’s a poet. But I agree with her that in the context of this specific role,the context makes what she’s called very important.

In a further twist, there has been stamping of feet elsewhere. Michael Horowitz has said that examples by Roger Lewis (writer, biographer and, presumably, poet) of his poetic emotion are “more emblematic of pseudointellectual chutzpah than Parnassian authority”. All very well, Michael, but you try rhyming any of that.

The net result of all the brouhaha so far is that this somewhat arcane position has been brought into popular consciousness. In addition, previously open to a mere 500-ish voters, the process has dragged itself into the webosphere and now 300,000 Oxford graduates are eligible to vote online. LOL as they say. Carry on like this and they might win best performer (oops) at next year’s BAFTAs.

Anyway, as candidates seem to be appearing and disappearing off the list like magic eye images, here’s my bid:
The dreaming spires
Seek Chair’s new poet
But all involved
Seem keen to blow it.

Don’t write off the hyphen

“If it moves, hyphenate it”. That was one of the not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek pieces of editorial guidance I was given in my first job as Editorial and Production Assistant for an IT education company.

Even allowing for the passage of time that has loosened the stays of English’s corseted grammar, the point still has merit. Well, some. I was recently looking at the British Journal of Sports Medicine’s website (don’t ask!). Its home page states, “the full back archive is now available…” Excited by the thought that there might also be a fly half archive – well, it was after all a sports-related website – I was crushed to realise what it actually meant. Hopes raised and dashed by a missing hyphen.

There are in fact loads of hyphen-related rules for struggling writers but defining them has never been easy. The preface to the 1911 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary says, “after trying … to arrive at some principle that should teach us … when to hyphen, we had to abandon the attempt as hopeless, and welter in the prevailing chaos.”

What’s odd is that in today’s txt-drvn, emoticon-punctuated, 140-character-delineated world, where worrying about hyphens – along with commas, semi-colons and upper-case letters – is construed as trainspotting without the anorak, the hyphen has come into its own again.

Search engine optimisation with its constantly evolving Dos and & Don’ts has given the hyphen, whether dividing or connecting, a new starring role. Who knows, as it knocks its old sparring partner, the underscore, into the shade, it might even move into the limelight – like the @ symbol, once the preserve of accountants and arithmetic teachers, and now star of its own show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

For now, the hyphen hangs on in there, representing a small line of defence by enforcing rigour in an environment of increasing grammatical laxity. Happy days.

Bettys branding – a cut above

Amazing, isn’t it, how a couple of doses of flu and getting ready to move 200 miles north can render you porcine and take your mind off the blogger’s ball? Or should that be bloggers’ ball? Or does the whiff of 1980s’ sitcom double-entendre make all other issues inconsequential?

So here I am in the beautiful snow-clad spa town of Harrogate and back on the information superhighway, the only highway for miles, by the way, not to be covered in grit. Just the odd gremlin. So naturally I’ve been to Bettys (sic), and indeed have bought Taylors (sic) coffee. And although I lived here many years ago and have visited many many times, this is the first time I’ve wondered about the missing apostrophes.

Not, I’m sure, that the company gives it a second thought. Quite rightly. They have the brand awareness most marketing departments would kill for. Anyone to whom I mentioned that I was moving to Harrogate said “Oh, Bettys” – or possibly “Oh, Betty’s” – and looked wistful. Turns out half of them thought Harrogate was in London but wherever they thought it was, they knew that that’s where they’d find Bettys.

Besides, in ignoring the English grammarians’ obsession with the correct use of the apostrophe (second only on this increasingly beleaguered group’s apoplexy-inducing scale to the splitting of infinitives) Bettys’ Swiss founders saved themselves from the grammatical quagmire they’d have entered in labelling their produce. “Betty’s’ fruit cake”, for example, looks as though it is has been spattered with currants.

Anyway, enough of fruit cakes. Three cheers for Bettys. Fat Rascals all round and I’ll have a pot of tea with milk, no sugar. Thank’s.

Here's how to do it. Well, not exactly…

Hats off to financial and other institutions for trying to stop hackers stealing our identities and money. And for their attempts to help guide you through the increasingly convoluted series of obstacles you have to negotiate in order to reach your own information. But do they always do a dummy run themselves to check that their instructions make sense?

I came across this the other day.
What, I wonder, made someone not just use the word “exactly” but highlight it in bold. Strange – unless of course there is indeed a pixellating function on modern keyboards and I am, not for the first time, blissfully unaware of this exciting new technological breakthrough.

The early bird catches the word

Who would have thought that BBC Radio 4′s Farming Today would offer such scant respite from insomnia? But yes, in August 1st’s programme, someone in Worcestershire stirringly put the ox in oxymoron by talking about the effect of the recession on “rural towns”. There was some discussion about how many people it takes for a village to become a town (3000 in case you’re interested) and about the demise of pubs and shops in market towns but the rural town was never revisited, conceptually speaking.

And as if this weren’t enough to awaken one’s etymological juices, the programme went on to discuss the rise of the “staycation”, the holiday where you don’t go anywhere. How lovely to discover that something you’ve been doing for years is now so cool that it’s got its own name – although it seems staying home to grout round the sink or reconstruct your U-bend doesn’t count. The real eye-opener though is to discover that staycation, variously spelt, has been around as a word since, if Wikipedia is to be believed…, 2003.