Sky News.... is it them or me?

flogen

Ok, just watching a sky news piece on the 16 year old "slasher" kid with 22 seperate convictions etc., and I noticed what to me was terrible grammer... or am I just wrong here?

The sentence said on the report was "...none was found this time", in relation to the drugs search the police carried out on the scumbags house. Surely it should be none were found.

Now I'm not one to nit pick at peoples bad grammer, or bad spelling, lord knows I get it wrong often enough, but for a pre-recorded report on a news channel full of supposed journalists, I expect some kind of reasonable command over the english language, or am I yet again asking for too much from these toe-rags?

flogen

simu

Yes, that sounds wrong to me too but I would expect such low standards from sky.

mike65

Correct and proper use of the language in the media has been in decline for a few years now.

Mike.

Genghis

You should pick yourself up a regional newspaper if you want to be really shocked. Misspellings, poor grammar, bad use of commas, poor overall punctuation and "conversationsal" reporting style. I find this kind of thing very annoying.

doh.ie

I heard something during that report on Sky News yesterday and commented to someone at work "That's very poor English for a broadcaster...", so I'm assuming it was the same thing.

Genghis is right about regional newspapers. One of my favourites a few years back was an in-house designed ad for a "Ladie's SALE this weekend!" How they cannot see the importance of proofing their own copy, I don't know...

article6

Technically, "None was found" is a correct usage. The BBC World Service says so, anyway.

In the context of the article flogen mentions, we see how discordant English can sometimes be. Some of the ambiguity is due to the way most of us treat "drugs" as a singular noun. If we treat it as a plural noun, it makes more sense, as in this sentence: "The police were looking for drugs [many drugs]... but they did not find even one". That corresponds to "The police were looking for drugs... none [not one] was found".

pork99

I remember an Irish Independent article some years ago which referred to the American Abstract Expressionist painter "William D. Kooning". Any relation to the painter "Willem De Kooning" I wonder.

Flukey

You'll find plenty of bad grammar everywhere. You have all the usual suspects like people mixing up there, they're and their, let's and lets, it's and its, when to use apostrophes, like knowing the difference between the following:

Toms cars.
Tom's cars.
Tom's car's.
Toms car's.

If you are interested in this kind of thing the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is well worth getting. Amongst its pages is this example of how puctuation can completely change the meaning of something:


Dear Jack,

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can forever be happy - will you let me be yours?

Jill.

Dear Jack,

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart I can forever be happy. Will you let me be?

Yours,

Jill.

It also recommends visiting this website The Apostrophe Protection Society

flogen

Flukey wrote:

You'll find plenty of bad grammar everywhere. You have all the usual suspects like people mixing up there, they're and their, let's and lets, it's and its, when to use apostrophes, like knowing the difference between the following:

Toms cars.
Tom's cars.
Tom's car's.
Toms car's.

If you are interested in this kind of thing the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is well worth getting. Amongst its pages is this example of how puctuation can completely change the meaning of something:


Dear Jack,

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can forever be happy - will you let me be yours?

Jill.

Dear Jack,

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart I can forever be happy. Will you let me be?

Yours,

Jill.

It also recommends visiting this website The Apostrophe Protection Society

I must admit apostrophe's are my downfall.

I must get "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", A cousin of mine told me it was worth reading too.

flogen

Flukey

This Board and the internet as a whole are full of misuses and abuses of apostrophes and a whole range of other punctuations and confusions of words. We are all prone to it: Your and You're, Their and There, Were and We're, you know the sort of thing. There are loads of them. Even those of us who know the difference between these things can make the error if we are not concentrating. I know I have. A quick read before you post will often catch them, though not always. Simple rule to get you going:

's after something is possesive whearas s after something is plural.

Joe's cars = The cars that Joe owns. He owns more than one.
Joe's car's = The unstated something of the car that Joe owns. The reader should be asking "Joe's car's what?"
It should be something like:

Joe's car's window.

That is the lesson for today.

bonkey

Flukey wrote:

Simple rule to get you going:

's after something is possesive whearas s after something is plural.

And s' after something plural and possessive, except when that word ends in s itself. (e.g. the Jones' house, not Joness' or Jones's)

And all of that goes out the window when you are referring to it in the possessive where the rules just change entirely.....

And let's not even try to get to abbreviations.

Oh crap. I wrote all that before drinking enough coffee this morning, and now my brain is leaking out my left ear. I need more caffeine.

jc

Hagar

flogen wrote:

Ok, just watching a sky news piece on the 16 year old "slasher" kid with 22 seperate convictions etc., and I noticed what to me was terrible grammer... or am I just wrong here?

The sentence said on the report was "...none was found this time", in relation to the drugs search the police carried out on the scumbags house. Surely it should be none were found.

flogen

I won't mention the missing apostrophe on "scumbags house". Whoops it slipped out.

The real flaw here is the cops should have slipped a small "twist " in somewhere and locked up the scumbag. This should be followed by a long "sentence".

seamus

bonkey wrote:

And s' after something plural and possessive, except when that word ends in s itself. (e.g. the Jones' house, not Joness' or Jones's)

Actually, that's an interesting one. If a man's name was Jones, and he had a car, you'd say "Jones's Car". But if the Jones family owned a dog, do you say "The Jones's dog", "The Joneses' dog", "The Jones' dog" or something entirely different?

ChipZilla

Sky News is a first cousin of Fox News and The Sun, so whaddya expect?

"Supposed journalists" is a good way of describing the people employed by all three of the above...

Zulu

Tabloid TV - what would you expect?

seanboy

I only watch Sky News to get the time, and whoever is discussing the newspapers' headlines before midnight.

Sky is the keep on the right-side of the line of what the governments position is. No one gets canned for rehashing press releases

OfflerCrocGod

I would kill for BBC 24! Why is it not broadcast over here? I love the quality of the BBC unfortuantely all I can get is Sky Thank God for the Beebs website it means I don't have to watch Sky to often

tipperaryboy

ahemm..it is broadcast over here on Chours Digital TV.You can also watch it over the web at wwitv.com and select uk

AntiRip

Sorry for off topic, but I'm trying to get a signature like OfflerCrocGod for Firefox & I just can't seem to get it right! I copy and paste the script but it just comes out as writing. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

aidan_walsh

AntiRip wrote:

Sorry for off topic, but I'm trying to get a signature like OfflerCrocGod for Firefox & I just can't seem to get it right! I copy and paste the script but it just comes out as writing. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

HTML bad, BBCode good...

a href = [ url ] [ /url ]
img src =

OfflerCrocGod

tipperaryboy wrote:

ahemm..it is broadcast over here on Chours Digital TV.You can also watch it over the web at wwitv.com and select uk

Thanks but I'd prefer it on the 28" None the less I'm kepping that for the Italian channels, I'm losing the language, ta tipperaryboy!

flogen

AntiRip wrote:

Sorry for off topic, but I'm trying to get a signature like OfflerCrocGod for Firefox & I just can't seem to get it right! I copy and paste the script but it just comes out as writing. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

There are plenty of places to find out more... Newbies / FAQ is probably your best bet, here is not really suitable

flogen

AntiRip

flogen wrote:

There are plenty of places to find out more... Newbies / FAQ is probably your best bet, here is not really suitable

flogen

Well I thought OfflerCrocGod would reply with the script as he's got it for his signature. It's not just a big deal anyway.

Sorry if here's not really suitable

OfflerCrocGod

AntiRip wrote:

Well I thought OfflerCrocGod would reply with the script as he's got it for his signature. It's not just a big deal anyway.

Sorry! I came back and someone already had replied so I just left it at that [PHP]
The best Internet browser bar none - for a web without ads or pop-ups.[/PHP]

Change to suit your own tastes.

sceptre

flogen wrote:

The sentence said on the report was "...none was found this time", in relation to the drugs search the police carried out on the scumbags house. Surely it should be none were found.

The jury's still out on whether "none was" or "none were" is correct. You'll find either used and both have been used for quite a number of years so I wouldn't get too worried about that particular discussion.

I found BBC News 24 referring to the "mythical" river Ganges in a number of repeated reports last year more annoying (purely because they repeated the phrase again and again). They changed it to "mystical" when I emailed and whinged. Then there was the time RTE's online news had a headline that read "Rebels raise Kingdom to the ground" (changed to "raze"). Newspapers are generally littered with bad grammar (Rupert's Times has long been the chief culprit) but I've not got the patience to even bother complaining about it.

Magnolia_Fan

Was that a quote?..if so then its not Skys fault

wheels of ire

seamus wrote:

Actually, that's an interesting one. If a man's name was Jones, and he had a car, you'd say "Jones's Car". But if the Jones family owned a dog, do you say "The Jones's dog", "The Joneses' dog", "The Jones' dog" or something entirely different?

Ah, this is a good one.The apostrophe is, at heart, a printer's convention, and much loved by pedants. We don't vocalise it, so the example ''The Jones' dog'', although being regarded as correct in the past , is regarded as being somewhat outdated by the Style Books of most major newspapers.
(You can find the Guardian's one on their site, www.guardian.co.uk)
Lynne Truss's book quotes Fowler's Modern English Usage as saying that with modern names ending in ''s''(including biblical names,and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ''s''),the ''s'' is required after the apostrophe:

Keats's poems
Philippa Jones's book
St. James's Square
Dumas's The Three Musketeers

With names from the ancient world, it is not:

Archimedes' screw
Achilles' heel

If the name ends in an ''iz'' sound, an exception is made:

Moses' tablets

And Jesus

Jesus' disciples.

But still there is debate, and this is not set in stone. Hope this elps

father_ted9t9

ChipZilla wrote:

Sky News is a first cousin of Fox News and The Sun, so whaddya expect?

"Supposed journalists" is a good way of describing the people employed by all three of the above...

Have any of you read the post which stated that technically they used the correct terminology??

"Technically, "None was found" is a correct usage. The BBC World Service says so, anyway.

In the context of the article flogen mentions, we see how discordant English can sometimes be. Some of the ambiguity is due to the way most of us treat "drugs" as a singular noun. If we treat it as a plural noun, it makes more sense, as in this sentence: "The police were looking for drugs [many drugs]... but they did not find even one". That corresponds to "The police were looking for drugs... none [not one] was found"."

People should read the answer posts before replying with silly answers, and the putting down of talented journos

wheels of ire

father_ted9t9 wrote:

Have any of you read the post which stated that technically they used the correct terminology??

"Technically, "None was found" is a correct usage. The BBC World Service says so, anyway.

In the context of the article flogen mentions, we see how discordant English can sometimes be. Some of the ambiguity is due to the way most of us treat "drugs" as a singular noun. If we treat it as a plural noun, it makes more sense, as in this sentence: "The police were looking for drugs [many drugs]... but they did not find even one". That corresponds to "The police were looking for drugs... none [not one] was found"."

People should read the answer posts before replying with silly answers, and the putting down of talented journos

Fair comment, But whilst I am willing to accept that there may be some talented hacks amongst the bottom-feeders on the Sun, they have frequently and fearlessly dragged the name of journalism down to a baser,coarser level.
That said, the subs who write the headlines are talented. When the then little-known Inverness Caledonian Thistle hammered Celtic, about 6-1, back page headline of Sun was 'Super Calley are fantastic;Celtic are atrocious'
Now, that is genius.
But against that we have to remember 'Gotcha' and 'Rejoice!, on the sinking of the Belgrano, not to mention their jingoism.
Private Eye memorably slagged this as 'Kill an Argie;Win a Metro!
(Note for younger readers, the Metro was a crappy BL car, surpassed in uselessness by the bigger Marina)

Flukey

Magnolia_Fan wrote:

Was that a quote?..if so then its not Skys fault

I know generally on Boards.ie we are not meant to point out errors in other posts, but in this thread we can be forgiven for making an exception. So, the above should be:

Was that a quote? If so then it's not Sky's fault.

Pedants of the world: Unite!

wheels of ire

It isn't just pedantry. What's at stake here is comprehension. And more.
I'd not be usually in favour of convention, of just doing someting because thats how we always do it.If we all did, the first fish that turned fins into limbs wouldn't have bothered. We would never have got up the beach, never mind trying to come down from the trees.
But punctuation and spelling, (to a lesser degree),are really important.
As English is the language with most words, lots of which have meanings which vary according to context, and where the pauses are, it has an enormous potential for being misunderstood.
For instance,at the top and bottom of long escalators on the London Underground are signs insisting 'Dogs MUST be carried'.
I used really enjoy asking unfortunate staff where I could borrow/get a dog so as to be able to use escalator, and when I'd get about 20 passengers arguing with the staff, I'd slope off.
On a rather more important note, proper translation of stuff is even more so, as if something is misinterpreted. Or worse. omitted entirely.
Before the latest Iraq invasion,when the Americans were still trying for a UN resolution, I watched Chirac say that he would veto the one as it was , 'Ce soir'. This pair of words were not on subtitles, but they completely changed the sense of what he said.
And seized on by the right-wing radio and so on. And now 'a fact'. After all,everybody 'knows' it, as they've heard it parroted so often. Goebbels was right.
Just as most Americans believe that Saddam was the culprit for 9/11.