Kerraway » English

Give the staycation a rest

Michael Kerr — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:41:01 +0000

This blog is coming to you from London, a city where, when people are escaping from their desks and then forced to return to their desks, they talk of nothing but holidays. Do they ever use the word vacation? No. So why do the witless staff of PR firms based in this same city insist on using inelegant variations of that word? In email after email my colleagues and I are bombarded with references to staycations, mancations and neighcations. This week, from the firm entrusted with burnishing the image of KLM, we received a “guide to the world’s best floatcations”. You know what the person who wrote that needs? A holiday.

Vox populi?

Michael Kerr — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:27:02 +0000

On Today on Radio 4 this morning, a contributor discussing the attitude of the Catholic Church towards contraception said three times that the clergy were beginning to take notice of “where people were at”. Later it was reported that a politician had said that British voters were “gagging for a change”. The contributor was from that venerable Catholic newspaper The Tablet; the politician was the leader of the Conservative Party. Just the sort of language you’d expect from them?

Doing without the word ‘iconic’

Michael Kerr — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:27:57 +0000

“Iconic” is one of the words banned by the Telegraph Media Group style book, on the grounds that it’s used too often and inappropriately. Surely there are times when we need it, some of my colleagues complain. Fewer than you might think. This morning I heard a former prison governor on the Today programme on Radio 4 describe the murder of James Bulger as “one of the most iconic crimes of our recent criminal past”. What’s wrong with “notorious”?

Manuel Rivas and the art of signing books

Michael Kerr — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:46:40 +0000

The publisher Harvill Secker held an “International Writing Day” yesterday at Foyles bookshop in London, where contributors included AS Byatt, Joseph O’Connor, Tim Parks and Nicholas Shakespeare. But it was the Galician writer Manuel Rivas who sat longest at the signing table afterwards.
In part, this was a tribute to his performance earlier. A handsome man with a shock of silver-and-black hair, he manages to combine the presence of a rock star with the delivery of a poet. As he spoke, at first about his new work, Books Burn Badly — inspired, if that’s the word, by the Spanish fascists’ attempts to “save civilisation” by
consigning even Plato’s Republic to the flames — he was followed in English by Jonathan Dunne, so fluently that they seemed less writer and translator than a couple of singers who have been harmonising for years.
The other reason Rivas spent so long at the signing table was that he didn’t just squiggle his signature; with a few strokes of the back and sides of his fountain pen he turned each dedication (see above) into a little work of art.

Our Just Back of the Year winner

Michael Kerr — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:06:55 +0000

One of the pieces I used in Last Call for the Dining Car was by Martyn Harris, whom I was lucky enough to commission when I was editor of the OpEd page of The Daily Telegraph. After Martyn’s death from cancer in 1996, the paper published a compilation of his work, for which Max Hastings wrote an introduction. Max said Martyn had told him several times that he, Martyn, could never do what Max had done and work as a war correspondent. Max’s response was this: “. . . it is far easier for a journalist to write about a great drama unfolding before him — a battle, an earthquake, a riot — than it is to conjure a brilliant literary souffle out of the commonplace ingredients of everyday life. . . ”

I was reminded of that remark when judging Telegraph Travel’s Just Back of the Year competition. Our top five included pieces on Mount Fuji, a ‘death’ on the Nile, the view from a window in Warsaw, and what one woman learned of Australia from a hospital bed in Melbourne. The one we chose as a winner, by Richard Lakin, was on an average day out with the family at a British beach.

The Spanish for strike

Michael Kerr — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:19:51 +0000

M y regular email arrived this morning from the dictionary publishers Collins with a ‘Spanish word of the day’. They missed a trick. The word is ‘huelga’, which refers to ‘a common phenomenon in some Latin American countries’. The email gives examples of how to use huelga in relation to doctors, teachers and dancers — but not postmen. A huelga is a strike.

Sub-Standard

Michael Kerr — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:30:27 +0000

Newspapers (or should that be media organisations?) tend not to touch the comments appended to articles on their websites. But surely they still tidy up the spelling and grammar when they lift them for print? Today’s London Evening Standard has a selection of comments from readers on Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80 million transfer to Real Madrid. Among them is this:

For another £20m they could of brought Newcastle.

Post-modern joke? Or sloppy cut-and-paste?

Heaney on translating

Michael Kerr — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:38:46 +0000

Lovely bit of phrasemaking this morning by Seamus Heaney on Today on Radio 4, where he was being interviewed about his translation work. Asked whether he turned to it when he lacked the impulse to write his own poetry, he answered that it was a way of “giving yourself the high of finishing without the distress of starting.”

Across the planet by rail

Michael Kerr — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:58:58 +0000

This week I’ve been looking through some of the best pieces the Telegraph has published on train journeys. Among them I found one by Peter Hughes that we ran over three weeks, a treatment justified not only by the length of the journey — from Wick in Scotland to Vladivostok — but by the quality of Hughes’s reporting on it. I’m often asked what makes a great travel piece. There are some answers here.

Spanglish in London

Michael Kerr — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:43:27 +0000

I’m considering having one-to-one lessons to practise Spanish conversation, so over the past few days I’ve been looking closely at the websites of companies offering tuition in London. I’ve been shocked at how poor the English is on some of them, given that they are the shopfronts of the business.

Talk Talk Spanish, for example, says under Where we teach: “We teach on location for Company’s and Individuals all over London and the Suburbs.”

London Speaks Spanish tells me: “These Spanish courses may target survival spanish, in case you plan to go to a Spanish speaking country for holyday.”

Spanish-Lessons-London.co.uk says: “4 skills are necessary to learn a language: although our courses focus on oral communication, we develop the other 3 skills reading, wring and comprehension.”

Yes, I know they are teaching Spanish, not English, but they are selling primarily to native English speakers, so why don’t they get their English sales pitch checked by a native speaker, and proof-read, before they put it up on the web? Some of these firms are also offering themselves as translators. Would you hire them?