Is There a Ring of Debris Around Uranus
Looking out for mis communication or maybe pesky apostrophes
A few months ago I was having a lazy afternoon and calmly flicking through my local newspaper when I happened upon this headline;
Police Chase Man With Knife in City Centre
I immediately sat up and took more interest.
Are the officers of the Scottish Police Service now wielding knives?
Are tasers and CS spray not enough, not to mention the ‘offensive weapon’ that serves as a baton?
Gee, I had not realised things had gotten this bad.
I finished my lavender tea, fed my dog, sat back down, switched on my reading lamp, the light fades quickly in early winter evenings where I live, and read on.
All was not as it seemed. I had been misled by a deliberately ‘sensationalised’ and contrived headline. The trick is to use emotive language, wilfully stripped of punctuation. In this case, it was innocent of a crucial,
‘comma’.
The simple comma is the least emphatic of all the internal punctuation marks. Its main purpose, simply to separate two independent clauses joined by a co-ordinating conjunction.
But, you know all that, so I will skip forward to my main purpose. The art of communication, or to be a bit more expansive, including the art of mis-communication.
It is not just newspapers in Scotland that mis-communicate in this fashion.
I read sometime in the dim and distant past that for every ten people who read a headline, only two bother to read past it.
That might be up for a fact check.
But, let us not allow the truth to get in the way of a good headline.
‘Buzzworthy’ headlines are designed to catch the reader’s attention and encourage them to ‘stay with the programme’ and read on.
I include some examples of actual, ’buzzworthy’ headlines;
Panda Mating Fails Veterinarian Takes Over
Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Is there a Ring of Debris around Uranus
Would these headlines entrap you?
And to round up this section, a sentence that appeared in an English Grammar exam I sat many years ago, complete with the question; What is missing?:
Mary Queen of Scots walked and talked half an hour after her head was cut off
So, what is missing?
You guessed it;
her head.
Whatever way one may view these examples, there is one constant:
All are innocent of punctuation, in particular; the simple unemphatic comma.
Having exhausted the comma, let us meander through the minefield that is Grammar, till we reach the pesky apostrophe, another can of worms. You will no doubt have seen signs about your own townships that fall foul of the apostrophe.
the pesky apostrophe
Following are three examples;
Open Sunday’s, Pie’s and burger’s
When an ‘s’ is added to the end of the word indicating it is plural, there is no need to insert an apostrophe.
I will now highlight the confusion caused by the pesky apostrophe, in a different context.
In one London burgh there is a sign at either end of the same road;
King’s Road at one end and Kings Road at the other.
So, is it the road belonging to the King or is it the road of Kings?
So where did the pesky apostrophe, or hē apóstrophos originate? Answer; In the Greek language many centuries ago. The Italian scholar Pietro Bembo is known to have used the apostrophe in a book he wrote in 1496. However it was not until the sixteenth century it took a bow into the English language.
This is not a thesis on the apostrophe, so, if I have made my point, let us move on.
Two examples of a different genre of mis-communication; Visual and Physical;
I was called to an incident outside an hostelry in a town I once worked in as a police officer.
An agitated official of the premises said he had punched an aggressive, ‘drunk’ customer on the nose, in self defence. The customer was refusing to leave the premises and acted in a threatening manner by tearing off his jacket and throwing it at the feet of the official, who immediately recognising that as a signal to fight, took defensive action. The drunk customer immediately ran away, leaving his jacket.
Next day I got a call to attend at a house in the town, where a male person wished to report being assaulted the night before at the location I have just described.
I attended, with the discarded jacket and was invited into the house by a male who was nursing a bruised and pretzeled proboscis.
He, with some difficulty, due to his nasal discomfort, explained that he had thrown his jacket on the ground as a sign of peace. To quote him,
‘Throwing your jacket in front of the enemy is a universal sign that you want to make peace’.
It was to his total astonishment that his sign of peace was rejected and he received a punch on the nose.
His wife, present in the room at this time, convulsed into a state of hysterical laughter and fell from her chair. Only my professionalism prevented my giggles from erupting.
The lesson of that encounter;
Be clear that the rules of engagement and, importantly, the signals to be used, are understood by both participants before engaging.
When negotiating peace, clarity of understanding is of prime importance.
On occasion police drivers, when attempting to ‘make haste’ will rely on their partner officer in the passenger seat to indicate if the roadway on their side is safe to proceed.
One learns quickly that the word GO, can easily be confused with the word, NO!
I will conclude with a more ‘subtle’ example of communication, involving how to ask a question, or in this case, how NOT to ask a question and how ‘out the box thinking’ can expose a poorly worded question.
A question in a University Physics exam paper asked the students to work out the height of a building using a Barometer.
A Barometer is a scientific instrument used to measure air pressure. Air is denser at lower levels and gets less dense at higher levels. By understanding that principle, it becomes possible to calculate altitude. The Aneroid Barometer however, which contains no mercury, measures altitude more accurately.
One, extremely clever student was marked down for his answer and as a result, failed that paper. He appealed. At his appeal hearing he faced three Physics Professors and was asked to explain why they should change his grading.
He answered thus;
Your question asked me to work out the height of a building using a Barometer, and I did.
The method I used was to wait until the sun was setting and casting a shadow. I sat the Barometer beside the building, then I measured the length of both shadows; the Barometer and the building. Because I knew the height of the Barometer, a simple arithmetic calculation found the height of the building. My answer was not only correct, but my method was clear and logical.
I should add, It would have been possible for me to have answered your question correctly by another method. If I took the Barometer to the top of the building and dropped it towards the ground, then timed how long it took to hit the ground, I could then have applied Newton’s Law, developed in 1687, to work out how far the Barometer had fallen, thus giving me the height of the building.
“Your question was not precise enough.”
He was awarded a pass and went on to gain a PhD in Physics.
And so here endeth my short epistle on the art of communication.