I’m a big fan of irony.
And also of journalistic integrity.
I never thought I’d have to combine the two, but, look, here’s how it breaks down. This website has a glaring typo. “To all members: Thanks for only sending in original articles that you have an exclusive right to the content.” As it’s a writer’s site, that’s pretty damned ironic.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened. When I send a text message, I use predictive text.
For those who are in the dark, predictive text is a function on your phone where it tries to guess the word you are trying to type for you, to save time. As such, you press the key that contains the group of letters you intend to pick one from, and it works out, via the combination of letter groups, what you are most likely trying to say.
For example, to type “hello”, one would press 43556. 4 being “GHI”, 3 being “DEF”, 5 being “JKL” and 6 being “MNO.” The phone works out that the most likely combination of letters from that list is “H-E-L-L-O.”
I know most people understand this, but there are a few who don’t and frankly, you people drive me nuts. It’s simple, and now I’ve explained it and performed a public service, maybe it will count towards my karmic total of 4,672,899 bad things and that one time I bought a Big Issue and then forgot to beat the homeless guy over the head with it. Anyway. Back to the task at hand.
When I’m sending a text message, I use predictive text.
My predictive text cannot spell “dyslexia.”
It’s not easy, being the only one who notices these things. A few weeks ago, when Elton John married his longtime partner David Furnish in one of Britain’s first “Gay weddings.” I use inverted commas because it was technically a civil partnership, but that was only because a gay wedding dress would have been so gaudy as to blot out the sun and bring about the apocalypse. Or the bigotry of the church, one or the other.
Still, when reporting the day’s news, one British paper had a large photograph of Elton and David above the headline to an unrelated article. As such, we were left with a picture of a prominent gay couple above a headline proclaiming that crime was on the increase.
And nobody except me found this odd.
I live in Bristol. (You should thank me, I live here so you don’t have to!!) Until recently, in the city centre, there was a prominent branch of a chain of shops which develop photographs. Their name, exactly as it is on the sign, is ” ‘20 Min’ Photos.”
Why, exactly, are there those marks around 20 and min ? It implies to me, at least, that “20 Minutes” is just a figure of speech, and that if they took five weeks to develop your holiday snapshots, you’d have no recourse because of two little curls on the sign.
I’m not sure when the western world as a whole slipped into this thought-free trance, where noticing things comes somewhere behind voting for Big Brother candidates and buying George Foreman grills.
If anything, the George Foreman grill is a perfect indicator of how smart we are as a people. We’re letting people cook food on an appliance designed by a man who got hit in the head every night for twenty years, and nobody bats an eyelid.
In fact, not to incur the wrath of George (let’s face it, the man could swing!) but it’s a fat reducing grill marketed by a man who wasn’t particularly slim even when he WAS a professional athlete.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the world is getting stranger. And stupider. One isn’t necessarily bad, the other certainly is. So pretty please, the powers that be, fix that typo so I can turn my bile outward again and normal service can resume?
…Thanks.
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