How to consume balanced media
With the highly charged election nearly behind us (as soon as Donald Trump is willing to admit defeat and behave like a grown-up) it might be easy to forget that we are living in times where what is true and what is false is being made more difficult to discern. The current President of the United States routinely makes false statements. This has become so common, in fact, that we have started to become inured to it. Of course, politicians…
80s environmentalism
I just remembered, as I put a drinks can in the recycling, that in the 1980s, when I was at school, we were told by teachers to crush cans before putting them in the rubbish bin, because that reduced their size in landfill. That, for the record, was 1980s environmentalism! We had “bottle banks” where we could recycle our glass – one for clear, one for green, and one for brown, or mixed colors. But that was the only recycling…
Uncountable nouns – A difficulty for non-native speakers of English
Long ago, a good friend of mine told me about some softwares he had bought. You cannot say “softwares” I told him, it’s “pieces of software”, or some other construct. He did not believe me, but I was right, though in those pre-internet days, it was difficult to prove. More recently, I edited the Pound Sterling page on Wikipedia because it said “There is a variety of theories”. Again, ‘variety’ is uncountable, so the correct version of the verb “to…