Builders, take note

This caught my eye when I was walking down John Bright Street (in Birmingham city centre) one day a couple of years ago. The space was being used as a canteen by a building firm while they were involved in a big construction project in the street.

Photo parade – in the wild

 Birmingham city centre:

 

BP garage, West Bromwich:

 

 A marque I hadn’t heard of before:

 

Lichfield shop:

Das ist Frau Ehlers. Frau Ehlers steht vor dem Herd. (1)

When I was teaching at a school in Tipton, I found a copy of the textbook “Sprich Mal Deutsch!” and had a flick through. The school had bought a set of these textbooks in 1981; this was the second edition, the first edition having come out in 1967. The methodology is very old-fashioned, which was surprising enough (I remember having used Longmans Audio-Visual French at school back in the seventies, which was space-age stuff by comparison), but what was more shocking and/or funny was the blatant stereotyping.

The book’s author, William Rowlinson, was a senior lecturer in Education at the University of Sheffield. He got out of the textbook game and into the dictionary game, which isn’t surprising, given the Victorian style of this book.

Rowlinson could almost be Walter Abish. (How German Is It came out in 1980.) We shall end our first glimpse into the world of the Ehlers with a little story:

More on French gender trouble

Recently I was surprised by the shock some people were professing that French people might have some problems getting the gender of nouns right. The other day I found a copy of Mauger’s “Grammaire pratique du français d’aujourd’hui” (Hachette, Paris, 1968) and the noun chapter includes an interesting section “Cas particuliers”, which I reproduce here. Section 26 is “nouns whose gender varies according to number”; 27 “nouns whose gender varies according to sense”; 28 “nouns whose gender the French don’t always agree on.”

An obvious point is that most of this latter group start with a vowel. I turned to Google to see whether any agreement has been reached, with results as follows:

après-midi: un 927k, une 435k; cet 1.75M, cette 488k.

Epicene.

automne: un 109k, une 1160; cet 721k, cette 20.7k; dernier 207k, dernière 623.

Overwhelmingly masculine.

effluves: grands 21*, grandes 33*; doux 65*; douces 89*.

Epicene.

interview: un 130k, une 1.53M, cet 52.6k, cette 290k.

Rather feminine, by analogy with entrevue.

entrecôte: un 115*, une 796*. (French pages only)

Feminine. “Quel adepte des normes orthographiques oserait défendre aujourd’hui de manger “un entrecote” ?”

orge: un 317*, une 236*. (French sites); mondé 464*, mondée 223*; blanc 78*, blanche 187*.

Confusion reigns, among the layperson** at least.

palabres: longs 288*, longues 365*

Epicene.

steppe: le 1390/253*, la 77,100/852*. (French sites)

Largely or overwhelmingly feminine, depending on which stat you favour, but there are still plenty of masculists out there.

Unsurprisingly, people make mistakes with even the most obvious genders. “le table”, for example, turns up on 870 French-language webpages and 467 .fr pages.

*Starred returns have been stripped. For example, if you use Google to search French-language pages for “le table” it announces that there are 37,700 matches. But if you click through the pages you find that there are in fact only 870 unique hits. I call this ghit-stripping.

 **Although I spotted this error right away, I decided to leave it in. That makes 6 examples on the Web.

For a better start in life

First time I saw Emily and Joshua’s alphabet blocks I was a bit sceptical. They’re so surreal, and the photos looked like they might’ve been photoshopped. But real they are. And to prove that they’re no fluke, I just found my own version while out shopping here in Birmingham. I was browsing in a cheap-shop (one of those where everything costs £1) when I saw this item among the children’s toys:

I’m sure that 90% of the toys for sale in Britain are made in China, but the quality is generally better than this piece of junk. I had to buy it though, for the Chinglish. Look closer:

That’s some dictionary they must be using. The words “refection” and “carbonado” had completely passed me by, until today. And that’s bad luck, picking the most obscure spelling of “cookie” (as a translation of “bread”). Not such bad luck though, to pick “malt” when the word you need is in the picture. I wish I could say that from now on I’m going to call Big Macs “Greatness Folds”, but it’s too much of a mouthful.

Notice that the blocks are numbered 13-24, so I’m sure there must be a 1-12 set out there somewhere… Happy hunting!

Big City Plan

“Birmingham is a great international city, renowned for civic innovation, racial and cultural diversity, as well as its creative and educational achievements. The city has made tremendous progress over the last twenty years, regularly being hailed as one of Europe’s success stories, with over £10 billion of planned investment in the city centre alone.

“Birmingham’s Big City Plan is a masterplan that will draw on that legacy to shape and revitalise the city centre over the next twenty years. To achieve our ambitions for the city and its people, Birmingham City Council is communicating the objectives and aims of the masterplan and engaging with colleagues partners, stake holders and our citizens.”

I’ve lived in the city for over twenty years, so I’m interested in how the (Conservative-LibDem) council is promoting and developing it, but as so often happens, I’ve only just heard about this initiative, even though it started in 2006. First, Professor Michael Parkinson of John Moores University produced a “Visioning Study“. This includes lots of interesting data and ideas, despite its intial nonsense assertion that “the real city centre has expanded from 80 to 800 hectares”. (And I skipped the bit about ”Local Asset Based Vehicles”.)

Then the council gave the job of writing the plan to a firm called Urban Initiatives. Of course, in the olden days the City would’ve done this job itself; it does have a large and expensive planning department. (What makes Jonathan Bore better than Emrys Jones?) Maybe its reputation has yet to recover from the mistakes of the 1960s?

To be fair, It didn’t take much searching to find a talk by Urban Initiatives’ Kelvin Campbell (14/11/07) in which he introduces the Big City project. He calls Birmingham ”the holy grail of urban design”. And the themes he introduces are listed on the new Big City Plan website:

Global Themes
Audacity	A city of brave people up for change
Centricity	A city with an expanded commercial core
Liveablecity	A city with a high quality of life
Complexcity	A multi-layered, gritty city
Authenticity	A city that is true to its roots
Diversecity	A cosmopolitan city
Familycity	Revival of the urban neighbourhood
Univercity	A learning city that turns its knowledge into business
Connectedcity	A city well connected to Europe
Smartcity	A city that uses its resources efficiently

Three questions:  Aren’t there too many themes? ”A multi-layered, gritty city”? And, this being an English blog, how original and/or naff are some of the theme titles?

1 Liveablecity (226 ghits): This term is being used in/of Austin, Texas.

2 Complexcity (470 ghits): The title of an artwork by John Simon; a blog about Toronto.

3 Diversecity (703 ghits): An architects’ exhibition; a Pittsburgh festival; a Siloist newspaper in NYC; a Canadian social agency.

4 Familycity (130 ghits)

5 Univercity (918 ghits): A Canadian housing development; a socioeconomic organisation in Worcester, Mass.

6 ConnectedCity (47 ghits)

7 SmartCity (731 ghits): A “business park provider” ; a “password wallet” ; an urban art project ; a management consultancy.