Peter Harvey, linguist

A participle

Does the BBC really mean this?

Two 10-year-old boys have been charged with raping a girl in west London. Each faces two counts of attacking a female under the age of 13 following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service, the Metropolitan Police said.

The use of hyphens

On Linguaphiles a question has been raised about prepositions. I do not wish to go into the precise usage of American English that is raised, but the post says:

We're both native American English speakers

Nouns used attributively can be ambiguous. Does the writer mean:

We're both native-American English speakers

or

We're both native American-English speakers

I suspect the latter but, technically at least, the phrase is ambiguous.

Young translators

Pupils from across the EU are today (24 November) competing for EU-wide translation prizes in a competition designed to promote the profession among young people in Europe …

eurActiv.com

Not speaking foreign languages

The Lumière brothers screened the first moving pictures. The Los Angeles Times of Dec. 24, 1995 (on the occasion of the centennial of their first public exhibition of films to a paying audience) included this sentence:

The Lumière brothers have a special place in the hearts of the French, who now use the word lumière to mean "light."

Hat-tip to LanguageHat.

Predicting the unforeseeable

What, in the light of these definitions from the COD,

predict
state that (a specified event) will happen in the future.

foresee
be aware of beforehand; predict.

are we to make of this headline in today’s Guardian?

Cumbria floods: Unpredictable but not unforeseeable

From the text of the article

Even at the best of times, it is hard to predict the future. To forecast an unprecedented flood is harder still, and to protect effectively against such a flood hardest of all.

it seems that the Guardian is arguing that, while the occurrence of severe flooding may be unpredictable, it is possible to take precautions that will minimise its effects when it does happen.

Dhivehi

Having apparently maligned the no doubt estimable language of Maldives in a recent post, I am delighted to say that an English-Dhivehi dictionary can be found here.

What language?

The other day I mentioned Google’s problems in identifying languages. Today I found this on my screen:

Foam oia shev zhe rohewó kych, osb ce afír sút ych efee uesc aima. Sicela ce raa he asa lóra iméch seem heri zú, aenih ovea uazk enoia ká juota mescat ysár. Gum osgia sésh iao foso dja bea ehaa tha rer. óch aja boach noimoc bed met, tehic asr. Osrav supun ró wue oath nybá jepán naajú shaf moar. Ucuer asaj toc jíkasc uene izipsas oön, tak uaztó toam? Méczea úmou scá cá ost, jíkasc feou oöw kon aiv uzóz ych asa zasc aesh rig ecz.

What’s that then? Google offered to translate it from Czech, Slovak and Danish before giving up. If it is European it is clearly an odd thing. I can be sure that it is not Basque, Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish, and if it isn’t Finnish it won’t be Estonian for they are closely related. I toyed with the idea of Maltese, Lithuanian or Estonian but was far from convinced. Then I spotted mv in the URL. I wondered about Moldovan but, as I thought, the Moldovan language is identical to Romanian.

A Google search found a list of internet country identifiers and it turns out that mv is the Maldives. Thus it is probably Dhivehi, which Wikipedia tells us is:

an Indo-Aryan language closely related to the Sinhalese language of Sri Lanka. Dhivehi represents the southernmost Indo-Aryan language. Together with Sinhala, Dhivehi represents a special subgroup within the Modern Indo-Aryan languages which is called Insular Indo-Aryan.

The Indo-Aryan languages are in fact a part of the Indo-European family (Wikipedia):

SIL International in a 2005 estimate counted a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu, about 540 million), Bengali (about 260 million), Punjabi (about 100 million), Marathi (about 90 million), Gujarati (about 45 million), Nepali (about 40 million), Oriya (about 30 million), Sindhi (about 20 million), Sinhala (about 16 million), Saraiki (about 14 million) and Assamese (about 14 million) with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million. They form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which consists of two other language groups: the Iranian and Nuristani.

It’s all Swedish to Google

The other day I looked at a web page in Spanish. Google put up a message asking if I wanted to have it translated. I said no, it should never translate Spanish. Fair enough.

Today I looked at my StatCounter page. I thought that it was in English, but Google thought that it was in Swedish and asked me if I wanted to have it translated!

Click to enlarge screenshot.

The BBC’s sources

What, if anything, is the meaning of the words ‘sources say’ in this from the BBC:

Sources say there is likely to be an EU summit next week to discuss who will fill the posts of President of the European Council and High Representative for Foreign Affairs.

Does not all journalistic reporting come from sources?

Malapropism of the month

In a site on the internet, the name of which I choose not to remember, I came across a reference to armature porn. I would like to think that it is a spell-check balls-up, but the mind still boggles.

The Spanish Royal Academy

There is an article here about the Spanish Royal Academy and what it does for the language. It should make interesting reading for those who think that the sole purpose of an Academy is to ossify a language and prevent any change. As I have argued here, an Academy can have a progressive role in the development of a language. The article is rather spoilt by the crass author not understanding what dictionaries are for. But he’s American, so he expects a dictionary to tell him what to do.

Hat-tip to Kalebeul

Buying a Kindle

There has been quite a lot of fuss in the media here in the last week about the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. Oddly, amazon.co.uk doesn't seem to recognise its existence, while amazon.fr and amazon.de lead their home pages with a link to amazon.com, where it is available. There is no amazon.es.

Tautology

Even in these days, when ships are less prominent in the British psyche than they used to be and flagship projects, bars and housing groups are the top of the Google list, there are still some of us who know what words mean and can recognise tautology when we see it. When the BBC talks of Cunard’s ‘flagship vessel’, we wonder when we will read of intruders being apprehended by the ‘watchdog Alsatians’.

Master and captain

We would hope that the Liverpool Daily Post could, even now, get its maritime terminology right, and I am pleased to say that it does.

The question of how to refer to the officer in command of a merchant vessel is a thorny one. My uncle, himself a master mariner with Cunard, used to get seriously cross when he heard people talk about the captain of a ship (he did admit that the Royal Navy could do what they damn well liked, but that was not expressed in a spirit of generosity and tolerance to his fellow seafarers). Yet, Wikipedia tells us that the Titanic left Southampton ‘with Captain Edward J. Smith in command’ and is right to do so. What is going on?

The clue is in the term ‘master mariner’. A merchant ship can only be commanded by an officer who has his master’s ticket, i.e. who has qualified as a master mariner (and in fact, for safety reasons, the first officer must also hold this qualification). Thus the officer in charge must be a master mariner and is the master of the vessel. Quite apart from that, the Merchant Navy has its hierarchical rank structure, which includes the rank of captain. So, Edward Smith, the master of the Titanic, had attained the rank of captain. We see this photo on Wikipedia, correctly captioned:

Unfortunately, the link from the picture leads us to this page, where Smith is described as the captain of the Titanic.

So what about the Liverpool Daily Post? Yesterday the Queen Mary 2 sailed into Liverpool, and the Post reports correctly (my emphasis):

QM2’s gross tonnage is 148,528 and her master, Commodore Bernard Warner, said: “You could fit Cunard’s very first ship, RMS Britannia, into our Britannia Restaurant onboard.”

So, a very big ship is commanded by an officer with a rank higher than captain. But he is still the master of the vessel.

The Post is also right to speak of gross tonnage. Wikipedia again:

Gross tonnage (often abbreviated as GT, G.T. or gt) is a unitless index related to a ship's overall internal volume. Gross Tonnage is different from Gross Register Tonnage. Neither Gross Tonnage nor Gross Register Tonnage are measures of the ship's displacement (mass) and should not be confused with terms such as deadweight tonnage, net tonnage, or displacement.

What the BBC means when it says

[Cunard’s] flagship vessel weighs 151,400 tonnes

is anybody’s guess. QM2’s mass (displacement) is 76,000 tonnes (Wikipedia). Now please excuse me while I go and weigh the anchor.

According to Commodore Warner in the Post (my emphasis):

“Although a new ship, QM2 is a traditional liner, not a cruise ship. A liner is a ship on a regular service across the ocean from point A to B. This ship is built for transatlantic service and we’ve done 25 return crossings this year. The other difference is this ship is designed to go faster. She has a very streamlined hull to slip gracefully and elegantly through the water, like her predecessor QE2 which was a ship in a million. Queen Mary 2 has 40% more steel in her hull than an equivalent-sized cruise liner, which means she is strengthened to cut through the Atlantic waves at speed, in all weathers all year. When you are crossing the oceans, you want to be on a proper liner. The ride and stability of this ship is amazing, even in a large ocean swell.”

What does the BBC have to say in its headline?

Huge cruise liner visiting city.

Brilliant!

I noticed this too:

Post: WITH repeated long blasts on her throaty whistle echoing off the Cunard Building, she boomed out notice of her Mersey debut.

BBC: One of the biggest passenger ships ever built - the Queen Mary 2 - has made its maiden visit to Liverpool.

but I’ll leave that one for another day.

Alphabetical order

Sometimes I have to translate a list of countries that is in alphabetical order. Unless there is a good reason not to do so, I usually change the order from Spanish to English. This screenshot (click to enlarge) is a list of countries from Windows Live calendar. Although the names are in Spanish, they follow English alphabetical order. For example, Alemania (Germany) comes between Francia and Grecia (France and Greece) and España is near the bottom between South Africa and Sweden.

Bélica appears to be a typo or spell-check error for Bélgica (Belgium), for which it offers pages in Dutch and French. Bélica is a Spanish adjective meaning military or warlike.

I’m sure they did!

Headline of the day:

Men wanted to test contraceptive

Singular and plural

Lord Coe said the distinguishing feature of Rio's bid had been the "transformational power of the games in a country that has not had it, in a country that is emerging".

Well, a city that had had it would not be a wise choice for the Olympic Games, but I rather think that when His Lordship said ‘it’ he antecedent reference was ‘the games’.

BBC English

Philip Hensher asks this question in today’s Independent:

A press conference in Germany, relating to a German election, held by a German politician; what language did anyone think it was going to be held in?

The BBC’s answer is ‘English’. The BBC reporter sent to a press conference with Guido Westerwelle following the German election could not speak German and asked a question in English. It had to be translated. It makes me wonder just how effective the BBC’s coverage of that election can be but it does give a new meaning to BBC English.

But this is not surprising. There is the arrogance of supposing that a press conference held by a German politician in Germany would accept questions in English, which was put down properly by Westerwelle with the words:

"So wie es in Großbritannien üblich ist, daβ man dort selbstverständlich Englisch spricht, so ist es in Deutschland üblich, daβ man hier Deutsch spricht." (Just as it is usual in Great Britain that people obviously speak English there, so it is usual in Germany that German is spoken here.)

This story also points up the desperate lack of people in Britain who speak other languages. According to Hensher:

One study, last year, showed that the numbers studying German at universities have fallen from 2,288 in 1998 to 610 last year. Those taking A-level showed similar collapses across the board, but with German taking the biggest hit.

This doesn’t surprise me. Language learning is declining in Britain for many reasons, nationalism among them. But the idea that everyone speaks English is not as true as many people like to believe: I will never forget the outraged British tourist I overheard in Barcelona saying ‘And would you believe it? I couldn’t find a policeman who spoke English!’

They forms with singular reference

In general I am in favour of the use of they forms with singular reference as a means of avoiding reference to the gender of the subject, which may indeed be unknown, but they must be used with some sensitivity for context and meaning and should not lead to the double-take that I at least did on reading this:

One viewer complained to the BBC about the episode, broadcast on BBC Two in March. The BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit agreed with their comments.

What’s wrong with:

One viewer complained to the BBC about the episode, broadcast on BBC Two in March. The BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit agreed with that viewer’s comments.

or indeed with the appropriate use of his or her?

I see two problems here. One is the distance separating the One from the their. The other is the most definitely singular nature of the subject. In a more general case, for example:

A viewer who complains to the BBC can be sure that their complaint will be treated seriously.

it is clear that the singular subject is in fact being used to mean All viewers and so the inherently plural nature of the their makes a kittle more sense.

Crash blossoms

Crash blossoms (for an explanation of the name see here) are newspaper headlines that are so unfortunately phrased as to give the wrong impression or even to be unintelligible.

A  classic version from AP that has been going round the internet recently reads:

McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers

To be fair, AP has now changed its headline to:

Potato farmer holy grail: McDonald's french [sic] fries

Hat-tip to the Language Log and Michael Quinton, who both acknowledge other sources.

Phonetic spelling

I sometimes wish that a recognised authority would give a lead in simplifying English spelling along phonetic lines, but I don’t think that the BBC is doing so when it writes:

A mountain is being renamed in honour of a Welsh princess who spent most of her life confined in a monastry.

The same article, which does manage to spell monastery correctly later on, also contains a nice garden path sentence:

Wales came under the control of Edward I and Gwenllian, as heir to the Welsh throne, was snatched from her home, reputedly in her cradle, and taken to an abbey in Lincolnshire.

On first reading it seems that Edward I and Gwenllian jointly acquired control of Wales, leaving us with a sentence that then dissolves into incoherence. This is a job for the semicolon:

Wales came under the control of Edward I; Gwenllian, as heir to the Welsh throne, was snatched from her home, reputedly in her cradle, and taken to an abbey in Lincolnshire.

This way it does make grammatical sense, though the two parenthetical phrases are unattractive stylistically.

Two letters

My old schoolfriend Alan Booth wrote this letter to a magazine for retired police officers and asked me for my comments. My reply is below his letter, which I post here with his permission.

Dear Sir,

I write in reply to your correspondent, George Smart ( Narpo News August 2009 ) concerning the perceived degradation of the English language.

I too, used to get annoyed by ‘Americanisms’, bad grammar, spelling etc. until I took the time to study the English language in detail after retirement. I particularly recommend the writings of Bill Bryson and Professor David Crystal on the subject.

English is a living thing, - it has been evolving for centuries and will continue to do so. I don’t think that anyone got irate about this process until now. This is probably because the speed at which changes are occurring, like everything else in this civilisation is increasing at an exponential rate, simply because of the speed and scope of modern communications.

Words become obsolete or assigned a different meaning; abbreviations, contractions and acronyms become words in their own right to convey information in a concise manner. Pronunciation changes. Fashions change. ’Twas ever thus and ever will be. We don’t say ‘’twas’ much these days, ‘bachelor gay’ doesn’t mean what it used to, you don’t want to know where ‘quaint’ came from and ‘ain’t’ has been going in and out of vogue for donkeys’ years, - which is a concept an eighteenth century scholar might have a bit of trouble grasping.

Maybe a few people got upset about the 15^th Century Great Vowel Shift, but were probably more upset about the Black Death, which is thought by some to have been a significant contributory factor. A few may have complained about the degradation of ‘God be with you’ to ‘Goodbye’. Maybe Mr. Smart’s great grandfather got annoyed by the replacement of ‘Good morning /afternoon /evening, etc.’ by ‘Hello’, a word apparently brought into common usage by the introduction of the telephone. Maybe his father chafed against the rise of ‘Hi!’ just as a few monks may have resisted the replacement of ‘Lo’ by the exclamation mark.-And yes, it was irritating to receive badly spelled ( or is it spelt ? ), badly punctuated, ungrammatical reports and statements, full of colloquialisms and sometimes almost devoid of meaning from probationers ( and in later years, senior officers ). The thing is, it’s happening. Whether it be due to poor education, fashion, emigration, plague or its modern analogy, - corporate requirement for the endless repetition of fatuous greetings and questions in restaurants – these are all agents of change whether we will it or not.

We don’t and can’t have a language which is controlled by an authority such as the Académie Francaise, fighting a rearguard action against change. That may suit other tongues but not ours. The B.B.C., with its promulgation of ‘received pronunciation’ had the peculiar effect of highlighting the division of social classes but, whilst providing some sort of standard to be aspired to by some, had relatively little, now waning effect on the way the vast majority of the populace speaks.

Because of our former huge influence on the global civilisation we now ‘enjoy’, the English language has developed and changed, almost beyond recognition in some places - but it’s still English. Inevitably, words and grammatical structures find their way back into everyday communication on this sceptred isle and who is to say whose word for a given object or concept is better than anyone else’s, provided it conveys its meaning to its audience and is not offensive or inappropriate in the setting in which it is used?

I am English and live in Scotland. Everyday I hear and read English which would be understandable to Mr. Smart, but which is quite different in grammar, stress, pronunciation and vocabulary from that which he hears and speaks, because it has evolved differently. ( OK, there may be one or two words he might have trouble with, but the man’s no’ glaikit, - he’d work it oot). That’s only a few hundred miles from him and in the same nation. Those among us who insist on The Queen’s English, whatever that may be, are a tiny majority in what is now a huge, interconnected world population of English speakers.

Relax, Mr. Smart! It is going to happen. The appalling errors in television subtitles ( in fact, television itself ), texting and ‘youthspeak’ – are just the evidence of an ongoing process. Were you to return ( the ‘proper’ use of verb tenses is on the wane ) in 100 years’ time ( as is the ‘correct’ use of apostrophes ), - you wouldn’t understand a word, but it would still be English.

Thanking you for your kind attention I am,

Yours sincerely, ( and I do mean that, although I wouldn’t had I written ‘ Your obedient and humble servant’ ),

A.J. Booth

__________

Dear Alan,

Thank you for sending me your latter. Basically I agree with you. I suppose you have come across a pedant who knows all about apostrophes, less and fewer, split infinitives, between you and I, and the like. Such people need dealing with severely. (The links are to relevant articles on my own blog.)

However, I do differ from the anything-goes school of thought in some ways. The problem is that some standard must exist if communication is to take place efficiently; I don’t doubt that I could find people not far from you who would insist that they are speaking English but whom I would find impossible to understand. For that matter, I do not always find checking in with easyJet at Liverpool Airport to be an easy linguistic experience. Not to mention this.

Nevertheless, it is always important to differentiate between clarity of pronunciation and accent itself. It is possible to speak with a strong Scottish, Scouse or other accent while producing the individual sounds clearly, and it is possible to speak RP so sloppily that it is barely intelligible. It should also be borne in mind, but often is not, that we produce far more spoken language than written language in the course of normal communication.

Something similar happens with the written language. Language is a medium; it is the means by which our thoughts are made available for others, so it follows that the communication can be no more clear than the thoughts themselves. In this regard I worry that the present sloppy communication is a symptom of sloppy thought processes, which in turn has implications for education beyond the simple teaching of the English language. For example, there ae people who write could of etc. for could have etc. Is this a simple evolutionary change that we should accept or does it show us that people are failing to understand the meanings of the words that express the logic of their thoughts? When a man tells us that he ‘may have been dead’ what are we to assume?

To answer a few particular points that you raise.

Chaucer’s use of queynt to mean cunt was a pun; the OED gives the etymology of quaint as:

[a. OF. cointe (quointe, cuinte, etc.), queinte:—L. cognitum known, pa. pple. of cognoscĕre to ascertain. The development of the main senses took place in OF., and is not free from obscurity (cf., however, couth and known).

In its older senses the Eng. word seems to have been in ordinary use down to the 17th c., though in many 16–17th c. examples the exact meaning is difficult to determine. After 1700 it occurs more sparingly (chiefly in sense 6), until its revival in sense 8, which is very frequent after 1800.]

Chaucer used queynt with its normal meaning more than once. The OED does not record cunt having been spelt with qu-. See also here.

It is easy for British people to criticise the Académie Française. I don’t know much about that institution, but I can say that the Spanish Royal Academy does a lot of good work. There are intrinsic differences between English and Romance languages that militate against complete standardisation of the English language; the formation of compound nouns and the associated use of hyphens is a case in point; so is the formation of phrasal verbs, which come, change, and go away as fashion demands. A Latin-based language is much simpler to standardise, and the Spanish Academy works with the academies in all Spanish-speaking countries (including the Philippines and the USA) to produce guidance that is valid worldwide. It is also worth mentioning that clear guidance from an academy could clarify some of the more egregiously stupid aspects of English spelling such as dependant (noun) and dependent (adjective), or practice (noun) and practise (verb), which survive because language snobs like to show off how clever they are. It might also allow us to do away with whom, which is quite useless but which hangs on to such an extent that I have used it myself above.

I am not certain that the British class system ever needed any highlighting, and the BBC’s use of RP was an attempt to use a form of English that would have national validity. It did so too; it was the form of English that we learnt to speak in Merseyside.

You’re quite right about the vowel shift. I’m sure that people who survived the Black Death sat around in their fifteenth-century taverns supping their newfangled hopped beer and bemoaning the way that the language was going to the dogs. ‘Chaucer must be turning in his grave,’ they said to each other. ‘The English language is done for. It’ll never recover from this.’ There is an obvious parallel here with the British suspicion of modern architecture. ‘That Hampton Court Palace. What a carbuncle!’ was the popular opinion of the time, I have no doubt.

You might like to look at David Crystal’s blog; Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words; the professional but very readable Language Log, where one of the contributors is Geoff Pullum, co-author of the monumental Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; Grammar for Grown-ups by my e-friend Barrie England, aka Baralbion; and of course my own language blog.

Best wishes,

Peter.

A euphemism

BBC

"This is good news for customers, not least because the fees for unarranged borrowing have been an area of ongoing concern for them," said the head of UK retail banking, Brian Hartzer.

He means overdrawing your account without the bank’s approval.

Exchanging links

In the last few months I have received a number of requests for link exchanges, mutual mentioning and so on with other language sites. I have finally got round to looking at them. A few of them look promising but here is one that I will not be featuring:

Hi!
My name is Mary Holmes*, i'm marketing manager at one of the most important translator forums, (URL).
We recently open a new directory at our forum, offering to translators more resources related to translations, and we want to put your blog on our list (URL).
What we are offering is to put your blog in our list, in exchange of a link on your blog to our forum, i think it's fair for both.
if you are intrested, just let us know... don't forget that this is a way to increase your popularity ;)

Mary Holmes

*I have changed the name but the original is just as British.

Music

Spanish radio tells me that I am listening to music by Vow-Han Williams. Well it’s better than the Vogon Williams we used to get!

Mrs Slocombe’s gato

Mollie Sugden was an actress in the British sitcom Are You Being Served, known for her concern for her pussy. Of course, in the world of British humour of the time, when sexual innuendo was an integral part of any show, there was no doubt what she was getting at.

She died recently. British obituaries have mentioned this, but El País today has an obituary of her, in which it says:

Sus únicas gracias iban dedicadas a su gato

Well, her only funny bits were about her cat – not even about her pussy.

It’s an insoluble problem for translators, but this article is credited to a Spanish journalist. I think the best thing would have been to ignore Mrs Slocombe’s pussy and concentrate on her ever-changing hair colour, which was also mentioned.

A few years ago I had a student who wanted me to go through a poem she had studied at the university here. It was by a Caribbean woman and spoke about her pussy. ‘I know that. It’s her gatito,’ she said. I had to explain. OK. Then later in the poem the author was concerned about her bush!

NOTE for non-native speakers.

Pussy is a slang word for a woman’s genitals. Bush is slang for a woman’s pubic hair.

NOTE for people who saw the series.

The gay character was the only one who had a satisfactory personal life. Not bad for those days!

Namesakes

I am not a science teacher in Nottingham with murderous tendencies (BBC). But please do look around my blog while you're here.

Vote for this blog!

For the last year this blog has had a notice that it is number 20 in the Lexiophiles top 100 language blogs. Now it is time for a new selection and I ask my faithful readers to vote for this blog in the Language Professionals category. To vote, click the link below.

Group nouns

Group nouns can be singular or plural. This is not a grammar point – it depends on whether your mind sees a singular homogeneous group or a number of discrete individuals: the football team that you support is the best in the country, but who are they playing next week? It is, however, best not to  mix number when dealing with such nouns. This is from today’s Guardian (my emphasis):

Any prime minister, however powerful, serves as a member of a cabinet. When that cabinet loses faith in him or her, and its members start saying so in public, the leader cannot stay … The cabinet knows Mr Brown is leading them towards a terrible defeat. They are not seeking revenge for the past. They want Labour to have a chance for the future.

A misattached participle clause

According to the South Yorkshire Star:

IT'S been the butt of smutty jokes for years... But now fed-up residents on South Yorkshire's most embarrassingly named street - Butt Hole Road - have finally ended the jokes. The residents on the Conisbrough street have clubbed together to change its name to Archers Way.

Well that’s fair enough, but I first read about it in The Northerner, a weekly digest of news from the north of England sent out by the Guardian newspaper. And what I read was this (my emphasis):

A street in Sheffield that has been the butt of jokes for many years has finally won a battle to change its name to something less ... behind the times. Residents of Butt Hole Road long ago stopped seeing the funny side of the legions of titterers taking pictures of themselves with their pants down next to the road's sign. After clubbing together to raise the GBP300 necessary to pay for a new sign, the local council has agreed to name the road Archers Way, in honour of its half-mile proximity to Conisbrough Castle.

We know that local councils are strapped for cash but such a munificent gesture from the councillors also seems somewhat improbable!