In good faith

What is it with the excuse of having acted ‘in good faith’ it is being used all over the shop at the moment. Notwithstanding that politicians are using it as a cover for potentially criminal behaviour, it seems that this is being used by the woman whose husband has been missing for a number of years. Apparently she has claimed life insurance on him, but it is all alright because she acted ‘in good faith’. Now I was under the impression that a person who is missing cannot be declared as dead until the passage of seven years. I am sure that man’s wife wasn’t doing anything with bad intent but it does amaze me that the insurance company paid out.

Anyway more details on the story are here, I was just interested that the phrase ‘in good faith’ has been used.

Yet again, we wake up with no resignation indication from Wendy Alexander.

Update:- Hmm, appears that the photos of this man and his wife from a year ago are genuine, the wife has confirmed this. This looks extremely dodgy.

A current word

The word untenable is being used quite a bit of late, but where does it come from. Well it is a word of Latin origin, from tenere the verb ‘to hold’. The verb is usually used in Latin with regard to beliefs or positions and we get the word tenet from the same root, a tenet being an article of faith or a philosophical position which is held. So something that is tenable is something capable of being held, it therefore proceeds logically that something which is untenable is that which is incapable of being held. Wendy Alexander’s position is untenable, and I have been arguing that she should resign. However Ms Alexander is being somewhat contumacious and is yet to put pen to paper and resign. Contumacious is a word that should be used more often, it means stubborn but it certainly sounds more intelligent.

If Wendy, Harriet, Mr Hain, and all the others caught up in this continue to dig in then Labour in all probabilities faces ruination. Oh well, I shall not mourn!

Vulnerable?

It is one of modern life’s buzz words. Everything has got to be viewed through the prism of what it means for vulnerable people. No-one ever explains what the hell these people are vulnerable to, alien abduction? heart attack?

The latest one is to do with digital switchover, OFCOM’s consumer panel have looked at what the digital switchover means for ‘vulnerable’. The panel Chairman has said “”We wanted to understand the experience of vulnerable consumers as they ‘go digital’,” This is absolutely insane what are these customers vulnerable to? I don’t know, suggestions please.

This is just the latest stock phrase that sounds all touch-feely and means bugger all. Can someone please define what we mean by vulnerable, to what or whom are they vulnerable? If we cannot get a good enough definition, please can we stop using this pointless, vacuous and utterly idiotic phrase.

English Language

This article made me sit up and think today. At the outset I will warn you, you may need a dictionary at points in this article! Anyone who knows me will know that I have a passionate thing for proper use of language. Indeed I have posted previously on an aspect of the English language. So often when out and about, I hear people talking and it really grates on me. It isn’t intellectual snobbery, I know I make thousands of little errors myself. I just feel that we should all know and use language properly.

Examples from the last week that irritated was a man on the train, about 35 or 40 who was on his mobile and claimed that “the doors have just shutted“. It was a terrible use of language, I caught a headline in London Lite on one of their innumerable pages of celebrity gossip along the lines of “Who we saw doing what with who”. Excuse me, but you missed out an ‘m’ at the end there. The perennial favourite has to be the use of ‘like’ in exchange for ’said’. I tend to be somewhat tolerant if the person saying it is under 20, but any older than that and it just sounds like the person has smoked too much dope.

I do however tend to be a little bit of a pedant when it comes to expressions of exuberance. Most people if asked how their holiday went will reply “fantastic”, so they are telling you that their holiday was a fantasy and ergo didn’t exist. Also I have noticed a strange phenomenon among some younger people to actually say ‘lol‘. This rather disturbs me. I was on a chat room the other day and someone typed “hello, lol“. My inner pedant couldn’t resist the response “Please explain humour content of introductory greeting?”.

On the pedant theme, few people in 21st Century England are “famished” or “starving”. You may be “hungry” but few of us have gone without food for anything like the requisite period that is needed to use the earlier words.

Also I am a little amused when people repeat the same words time and time again in a sentence, a minority of these words there is a de facto requirement to be repeated. However some do not need repeating, so don’t! I have found again over years that I appreciate the advice of my English teacher who had a rule, that in her lesson that the use of the word ‘get’ or any derivation thereof was forbidden. There are so many ways of expressing possession or acquisition in the language, and ‘get’ frankly sounds a bit crap! Finally, and this applies to a fair number of public speakers, only use words like ‘finally’ or phrases ‘to conclude’ when you in the terminatory phase of your peroration and not at any other point, because otherwise it is pretty stupid!

The English Language

I know we hear a lot about the decline in the quality of both our spoken and written language, I am sure that I am guilty of many mistakes and lazy habits myself. Whenever I hear a group of teenagers together I cringe, not only are there ‘innits‘ galore, there are many other crimes too including employing simile for speech and the oft lamented use of ‘of’ instead of ‘have’. There are many other monstrous crimes committed against our language too but I think of one which was committed many centuries ago. This was the decline of the use of the English second person informal pronoun. Now many of you will think that I have gone barking mad. Surely we still use a pronoun for the second person. Indeed we do. We use the formal pronoun ‘you’. The informal pronoun was ‘thou’. Within this pronoun group we have also lost out on ‘thine’ and ‘thy’. In fact these pronouns are only now used in conjunction with God. I find it faintly ironic that the only entity still spoken to informally is the entity least deserving of it. Anyway, thee, thou, thine and thy having been lost are unlikely to be revived but I still think it is a shame. Dost not thou?