From the current Private Eye.

You’re wading into murky waters these days if you call someone out for misusing the English language but I think it’s fair enough to hold the self-appointed gatekeepers, the teachers and the editors, to a higher standard.

As a 2nd-language writer, I often get corrected on my use of conditional sentences. People routinely strike out my "were" to replace with "was." I stand by: "If she were a musician" & "If she were a dragon" & "If she were a prime minister"
sigh. is this a British thing?

— Olga Zilberbourg (@bowlga) June 12, 2023

Someone called me “a minefield of information” today, which was rather lovely, so I didn’t pull on my pedantic trousers. I did, though, grimace inwardly when the sack of lumpy custard pretending to be the Prime Minister encouraged people to go “into the breach”, one of the more persistent and tiresome misquotations of Shakespeare; and when, even less forgivably, in the latest episode of Doctor Who, the unseen Lethbridge-Stewart is referred to as a Corporal...

 From the current Private Eye:

Two tweets in rapid succession about how to deal with wrongness, in others, and in yourself.

Twitter etiquette advice required. Someone tweets excitedly about being able to spend time in the ancient library of a famous university but spells it wrong. To tell them or not?

— JMB (@JezzB2) 7 April 2019 

There should be a hotline you can call where you can safely pronounce words you've only ever read out loud for the first time, and they say "oh sweetie" and kindly explain how it's pronounced.

— potch (@potch) 5 April 2019

The first seems straightforward enough: leave them* be; what’s most important is that someone is enjoying a great library and you don’t want to spoil that experience; it may just be an excitable slip of the thumb, and Twitter doesn’t have an edit facility. The second is interesting because it’s about awareness of one’s own fallibility, rather than a desire to flag it up in others. And it prompts a line from Mark Twain: “I never make fun of a man for mispronouncing a word; it means he learned it by reading.”

The problem is, of course, that language needs *some* rules, or it’s no longer a language. By electing to let the misspelling of “Bodleian” (I assume, and Blogger autocorrects that to “Boolean”, which is interesting in itself) slide, we’re acknowledging that another orthographic car crash, further down the line, may be worthy of intervention, before we’re in a Tower of Babel** scenario. And who decides where that point is?

*And yes, I know I’m using a plural pronoun to denote a non-gender-specific singular and five years ago I would have flinched at that, so change is possible...

**And there’s a further dilemma, about assuming a hypothetical reader’s knowledge of the Bible, of whether I need to explain that reference, but maybe that’s enough chin-stroking before The Archers omnibus has started.

PS: Jezz, the originator of the first tweet, wishes to say that he wasn’t being pedantic; he was simply seeking to save someone from potential embarrassment. Happy to clarify.

So it was Talking Musical Revolutions last night, transplanted to a pleasantly dank cellar in Shoreditch, and Stevie Chick is discussing his fine-sounding, just-out book about Black Flag with John Robb, and Stevie mentions that guitarist Greg Ginn was a huge Grateful Dead fan, and how the whole punk Year Zero concept is a bit of a myth, and that the Sex Pistols were really into Yes, and I mutter sotto voce that, actually, it was the Buzzcocks (specifically Steve Diggle) who were into Yes, and Billy completes my thought process by asserting that the Pistols (specifically John Lydon) were more into Van Der Graaf Generator, and I wonder whether we should start a Facebook group or something of that ilk for people to get all nerdy about the banal minutiae of the whole Now-Form-A-Band culture, although wouldn’t it be more punk not to care?

Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s story collection Nocturnes, which isn’t bad – I don’t think Ish is capable of bad writing – but is, it must be declared, a little on the slight side. The subtitle, ‘Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’ says it all really: there are five stories; all involve musicians; all take place, at least in part, as night falls. And, uh, that’s about it, really. No buttoned-up butlers, no cloned teenagers, no pianos in the toilet.

The best of the bunch – and the one in which music is least central to the narrative – is ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, which involves a 40-something language teacher staying at the London flat of some rather more successful university friends. Ray (the teacher) and Emily (half of the successful couple) once bonded over a mutual appreciation of the Great American Songbook; which makes it especially jarring that Ray refers to the work of ‘Howard Arlen’, especially since it’s a Harold Arlen song that gives the story its title. (When I saw David McAlmont in London last year, he said that Arlen had been his favourite composer for many years, but he hadn’t realised it, because he’s a wee bit anonymous when set alongside the likes of Gershwin and Porter.)

Of course this may not be a mistake on Ishiguro’s part. He’s renowned for the unreliability of his narrators, so perhaps it’s a subtle hint that Ray doesn’t really know as much about music as he thinks, like Patrick Bateman not being able to distinguish the Beatles from the Stones. But it does feel rather similar to Julian Barnes’s booboo in Arthur and George, in which the Jesuit-educated Conan Doyle appears to confuse the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception.

I need to be careful here. Ishiguro’s writing fiction, as is Barnes, and that offers any number of get-out clauses for factual imprecision. I write about reality, and unless I’m going to pull the postmodernism defence, readers and critics would be fully justified if a book or article of mine includes something that just ain’t so. Moreover, my next book, The Noughties, aims to cover a whole decade, which means they’ll be entitled to point out errors not only of commission, but also omission.

Maybe I can redefine myself as an unreliable author.

When the wireless connection fails on my laptop, as seems to happen quite regularly, I get the following message:

None of your preferred networks are available.

Which is annoying on two counts: first, it should really be "None of your preferred networks *is* available", since "none" is singular; but also because when I want to complain about Apple's lousy grammar, I have to use Small Boo's computer.