welcome to hell - well regional sports journalism anyway

It's not just policy nerds who love their jargon and meaningless sentences. Sometimes the people who are paid to explain this stuff get lost up in their own lingo.

Tonight's Evening Chronicle - awful rag - contained a column from sports writer John Gibson. Bizarrely, it's called Straight from the Shoulder...

Anyway, tonight's opening sentence was a classic. It read:

United must return to the torture chamber within the next 48 hours to search for the key by which they can escape.

Now, I'm no Newcastle fan - I like my teams to win stuff - but what on Earth does that mean?

If United return to the torture chamber, to get the key, surely that means they've already escaped?

Does the torture chamber refer to the match or something else?

And if it is the match, isn't that kind of an extreme way to describe a football match?

Reminds me of a rather over-the-top features writer I once worked with  who described a runner as "Belsen Thin" and when I complained on grounds of good taste told me it was OK because the Sunday Times once used it...

Keep it simple

Will

Think Different

At work I have to use an horrendous black box called a Dell.

At home I use a wonderful Macintosh. A sleek white MacBook. You know that I'm  a Macintosh nerd. Love them, always have and I always will. They just work.

Now what's this got to do with Plain English? Well nothing, but it has a lot to do with keeping it simple - my other consuming passion.

Today I had to burn some pictures to a compact disk. Unfortunately I had to do it on the Dell.

1. Why on Earth doesn't the CD Rom appear on the Finder - sorry Desktop - when you put it in the machine?

2. Why, when you eventually find the blank disk - hidden away somewhere on the system - and drag it across doesn't it copy the file straight away?

3. Why do you have to then click on another option called write this file to disk? Of course I want to write the file to the disk - why the hell else would I drag the file into it?

4. Why doesn't a simple box pop up telling me that the operation has been successful?

It's infuriating.

Keep it simple (and get a Mac).

Will