Friday, November 17, 2006

One in the eye for English

As a trainee journalist I once wrote a piece so overburdened by intellectual ambition that my tutor said it made him want to stab himself in the eye with a knitting needle.
In other words, keep it simple. It's the best advice I ever had.
The lesson sprang to mind this week when Labour AM Denise Idris-Jones made an interesting speech about culture - interesting, but there's a prize for anyone who can tell me what this means: “We use quality as our yardstick. We use it to evaluate the present and frame the future.”
Welsh culture is apparently essentially "quality based". I beg to differ.
Devolution has provided an outlet for some particularly odious jargon. Without doubt the best, or worst, example of this, and possibly the most heinous crime to befall the English language, is contained within the Welsh Baccalaureate. Its maths component is called "Application of number". I suggest the person who concocted this sentence undergo a course called "Application of knitting needle".

1 comment:

Glyn Davies said...

I hope you noticed that the Presiding Officer cast his vote against today's Business Statement in the National Assembly "with great pleasure". You cannot accuse him of anything but an even handed approach.