Category: language

Nigella-watch Part 3

Another week, another post about the ridiculous new series of Nigella Express.

This week’s episode reached the height of all absurdity, simply because of the horrible language the Ms Lawson uses when describing the food.

Lest it be forgotten, Nigella started out as a food writer, rather than a finger-licking kitchen siren, so it’s inevitable that some of her language will be a bit flowery, but I’m going to give you a couple of examples:

– “I just love the haunting brininess of the olives”

– “Mmm, I adore the resin-y rosemary”

Haunting brininess? Does that mean the olives wear white sheets over their heads?

It’s a shame, because her food is often pretty tasty, but this new series is light on good recipes and heavy on mannered looks to the camera, the incessant reminders that “I’m too lazy to chop up an onion” and the ridiculous segments where she “meets friends”.

Hey man, 143!

KlaxonsI’m officially old. I know 35 isn’t exactly prehistoric, but a couple of things recently have confirmed this for me.

Firstly, I was mildly horrified to realise I’ve never heard any of the music from this year’s Mercury Music Prize winners The Klaxons. Of course, if it had been Amy Winehouse, Maps or Arctic Monkeys I’d have been OK.

The second shock was that there’s some cool new slang going around wiv the kids, namely 143. I didn’t know what it meant either, you see. It’s short for ‘I love you’ and kids are now texting other friends, to let them know how they feel.

What I want to know is why no-one’s invented a virtual rose to send, rather than three digits. After all, nothing says it like a bunch of flowers, real or not!

Mysterious vowel movement – bacn

The grammar police have been called following the mysterious disappearance of the letter ‘o’ in a new Web 2.0 definition.

Over the weekend, the word ‘bacn‘ appeared in various emails and feeds. Used by the so-called netheads, it describes “low-priority” e-mail that is not important enough to reply to immediately, but is not spam – examples include Facebook notifications.

The Web 2.0 authorities are looking into this new vowel movement, as there is mounting concern that soon all the ‘a’s ‘i’s and ‘u’s will also disappear.

Early start-ups such as Flickr were blase about dispensing with the ‘e’ and this has become a common deletion, but this new dropping of the ‘o’ has provoked widespread condemnation.

Reports that the term ‘ssg’ being introduced to describe a mish-mash of different Web 2.0  products are unconfirmed!