Malapropism online?

I know it’s a bit early in the week, but consider this interesting example of linguistic innovation:

“We remain keen not to introduce a fixed cap on our products, as we do not feel this consumerate with the general needs of most Broadband users.”

At first I thought it might be a malapropism (“an incorrect usage of a word, usually with comic effect” – Wikipedia). Well, the effect is definitely comical, but is ‘consumerate’ a word? I’d never heard it before. Googling it produced 374 hits, most of them using it as a noun (analogous with ‘electorate’), whereas it’s used as an adverb in the quote. Or is it an example of euphony (“language which strikes the ear as smooth, pleasant, and musical”)? Hmmm… Glad I’m not a lexicographer. I’m reminded, though, of a conversation I once overheard in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. Two middle-class ladies were bragging to one another about the merits of their respective husbands’ company cars. “The thing about Jim’s Volvo”, said one, “is that it’s very good for the environment”. “How’s that?”, inquired her companion. “It’s got a cataclysmic convertor”.

Thanks to James M, who found ‘consumerate’ in an email from Plusnet to its subscribers which was published on the ADSLguide site today.
9:11:00 AM    

Call the firewall brigade…

… is the headline the sub-editors put on today’s Observer column.

Skype stats

Skype, the free VoIP service, seems to be spreading like wildfire. These statistics come from Kevin Werbach’s Blog:

* 13M+ users registered
* 1M+ simultaneous users reached for the first time a couple of weeks ago
* almost 2.4 billion minutes. Just to put things in perspective: Vonage has 170,000 customers and passed the billion minutes mark sometime in 2004
* 295,000 users have signed for SkypeOut (Skype has a goal of 5% conversion from the free service to SkypeOut)

What we’re up against

I’ve been trying to forget about the US election result on the grounds that we have to live with it and move on. But then, while clearing out some old newspapers and magazines this morning, I came on Andrew O’Hagan’s wonderful report from the Republican Convention in the London Review of Books. Here’s the passage that really depressed me:

“A certain mica sparkled through the atmosphere of the Republican National Convention: it was the notion that a lack of patriotism was the enemy of democracy, that a love of nuance was a brand of elitism, and that being proud of your country was the only strength that mattered in foreign relations. In this same atmosphere – pungent with intolerance – the notion prevails that foreigners hate America not for its actions but for its values, its ‘way of life’. When people speak of American imperialism this is what they more often mean: not the corrupting, internecine dealings of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, the cronyist, Saudi-protecting demeanour of the Texas oil barons, shocking though all that is, but the everyday self-certainty that makes America a fighting force against other cultures and ways of life. The delegates have breathed a lot of this stuff into their lungs in recent years, but they wanted more. ‘The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom,’ said a woman from Iowa wearing a cloth elephant on her head. ‘They don’t have any culture and they hate us for having a great one. And they hate the Bible.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘The Iraqis had a culture for thousands of years before Jesus was born.’

‘What you saying?’

‘I’m saying Muslims were building temples when New York was a swamp.’

‘You support the Iraqis?’

‘No.’

‘You support the killing of innocent people going to work? People who have to jump out of windows?’

‘You aren’t listening to me.’

‘No, buddy. You ain’t listening. These people you support are trying to kill our children in their beds. Where you from anyway, the New York Times?'”

Noam Chomsky

This is a thumbnail of a lovely recent portrait by Sam Javanrouh. You can see the full-size version here.

‘Blog’ picked as word of the year

The BBC reports that “the term ‘blog’ has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by a US dictionary publisher. Merriam-Webster said ‘blog’ headed the list of most looked-up terms on its site during the last twelve months.”

How to say ‘No’ politely

I get sent a lot of email attachments — many of them in Microsoft Word format. I’ve been wondering for some time how to tell my correspondents that this is unacceptable to me (I am, after all, one of the founders of Living without Microsoft!), and have finally got round to drafting a piece of boilerplate text that I can send back. My starting point was a web page written by Richard Stallman which contains some draft text. It didn’t seem exactly appropriate, so I modified it a bit to read like this:

Thanks for writing. However the attachment to your message is in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format that I avoid whenever possible. If you send me plain text, rtf, HTML, or PDF, then I will read it.

Distributing documents in Word (or Excel) format could be bad for your correspondents because they can carry viruses (see http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/macro.html). Sending Word attachments could be bad for you, because a Word document normally includes hidden information about the author, enabling those in the know to pry into his or her activities. For example, text that you think you deleted may still be embarrassingly present. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3154479.stm for a celebrated instance of this.

But above all, sending people Word documents puts pressure on them to use Microsoft software and helps to deny them any other choice. In effect, you become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly and reduce the incentive for people to explore alternatives. Can I respectfully ask that you reconsider the use of Word format for communication with other people?

The trick is to be polite while being firm, and to avoid being sanctimonious. The aim is to make people think, not to put their backs up. I’m not convinced that this draft manages that. Hmmm…

The art of conversation

Overheard at Stanford:

Girl: “I’ve had three nervous breakdowns and they’re not that bad.” Nervous breakdowns? “[You know,] to the point where you can’t stop crying for days.”

Heavily made-up girl: (in an indignant tone) “You know, everyone is always bashing Western civilization.”

[From Aaron Schwartz’s Blog.]

I don’t believe it!

Meet the smartest three-month-old in the world.

Not my photograph, alas, but one taken by a proud parent and sent on by understandably proud grandparents. What I love about it is her expression of intrigued astonishment — like that of a retired colonel reading an article about body-piercing.

Stuff happens…

… as Donald Rumsfeld famously said. Who’d have thought that David Blunkett, the Home Secretary (that’s Minister of the Interior to non-UK readers) would have a glamorous mistress (who also happens to be the publisher of a right-wing magazine)? I always thought of Blunkett as the kind of serious chap who, when not devising measures for curtailing civil liberties in the interests of “law and order”, read the works of St Thomas Aquinas. It just goes to show that, as my dear Ma used to say, one cannot judge a book by its cover.

Mr Blunkett has now fallen out with his inamorata and is involved in a dispute over (i) paternity rights and (ii) whether he used his influence improperly to secure a visa for her nanny. Item (i) is meat and drink to the British tabloid press, while (ii) is of great interest to the chattering classes. Accordingly, his extra-curricular activities tend to dominate the news agenda, much to the dismay of his boss, Tony Blair, who had fashioned an entire electoral strategy around Blunkett and his tough, no-nonsense, law ‘n order agenda.

It all reminds me of something that Harold Macmillan, Britain’s most entertaining post-war Prime Minister, once said. A journalist asked Mac what he feared most. “Events, dear boy, events”, he replied.