126. Have you seen The Release Man? (who lives on White Hart Lane)

I find all forms of language interesting.  In my opinion, it doesn’t matter about grammar, pronunciation or accent.  The only thing that matters when speaking or writing is intelligibility. In other words, the only thing that matters is that the person speaking or writing is understood.  That is particularly important for sports commentators.

If you were listening to Alan Green’s commentary at the end of England v Iceland last night on BBC Radio 5, you’d have heard this:

“And that is it.....Fantastic win for Iceland. ….Don’t take anything away from Iceland, they were outstanding……Brilliant……They denied England everything…..but England were shocking……”  

“Don’t take anything away from Iceland.”  What did he mean by that?  “Don’t take anything away from *winning team*” is a phrase that commentators often use at the end of a game.  It must have been something to do with Iceland’s performance as a football team.  It couldn’t have anything to do with anything else as that would be irrelevant to them winning a football match. 

I have never heard that phrase being explained.  I hear it a lot at the end of football matches and I have come to understand that it means that a team have won a game because they played very well indeed.  There had been no element of luck in the win and they would have won no matter what had happened.

So why did Alan Green finish that piece of commentary by saying, “but England were shocking……”?

By saying that England were shocking, he surely was taking something away from Iceland’s performance.  He was saying that perhaps Iceland wouldn’t have won if England had played as well as they could but that is silly.  It could be said of any winning team.  England wouldn’t have beaten West Germany in 1966 if West Germany had played a bit better.

Before the game, Roy Hodgson, the manager and coach of England was asked what England needed to do in order to progress in the tournament.

“We need to get three or four results,” he said.  So, everything should have been good because England definitely got results.  

0 - 0 is a result, so is 1 -2 and so is 3 - 0 but sadly for him and us, 1 - 2 is but it isn’t and never has been the same as a “win”.  When and why in football parlance, did “result” become a synonym for “win”?

Apparently, according to the television co-commentator who I think was Glen Hoddle, one of the reasons that England were so poor was their lack of a “Release Man”.  

What the hell is a Release Man?  It is obviously important because Hoddle asked more than once during the game, “Where’s the release man?”

Now I don’t want to take anything away from Glen Hoddle but he does talk bollocks sometimes. 

No wonder England were “shocking”.  Maybe this explains everything because I don’t suppose that any of the playing squad ever have a clue what the coaching staff are talking about at training sessions.  

This confusion leads to these outcomes:

1.  When Hodgson told them that he wanted a result, they all had different scorelines in mind.  Too many aimed at 1 - 2.

2.  Rooney thought he was following instructions when he deliberately sent every pass to a player in a blue shirt.

3.  This explains why all crosses into the penalty box were sent fifteen yards over the head of the furthest England player.

4.  I couldn’t understand at the time why almost every shot on goal went 10 feet over the bar but I do now.  

5.  Too many of the players spent the game searching for the Release Man or, 

6. Perhaps, they were all following different plans. 

Everything makes sense now.  

The England squad, collectively, earns around £2.1 million pounds a week.  In my opinion, that is money that would be better spent on the National Health.

125. Fiddly Finger Food

I never complain in restaurants.  If the service is poor, I keep quiet and if the food is awful I say nothing.  I just put it down to experience and I never return. 

But, if the waiter or waitress makes a point of coming over to our table during the meal and interrupting the conversation to ask, “Is everything all right?” or, “How is your food?” I will tell him or her exactly what I think of it.

I work on the assumption that they ask because they want to know.  Caroline says that they are just trying to be polite but I don’t think that it’s very polite to interrupt two, four or six people just at the moment that I am reaching the denouement of a very interesting, amusing and always captivating anecdote.

Perhaps it’s because I never complain that I am never embarrassed in restaurants - except once, perhaps.  We visited “The Hoxton Apprentice” in Hackney where Hannah, a teaching assistant who helped me at school, was employed in the evenings.  Part of Hannah’s function at this training restaurant was to look after and supervise the long-term unemployed young men and women who were being given a start in the restaurant business.

Our table wasn’t ready and we were asked to wait in the bar.  I asked the young woman for a red wine and a gin and tonic.  She came back a minute later and put the gin and tonic in front of Caroline. 

“No, that’s mine,” I said.

“You can’t ‘ave that,” she scoffed, loudly. 

“That’s a girl’s drink!”

You will have heard of road rage but have you ever witnessed food rage?  I did once and although it was very funny, it was also embarrassing. 

Some thirty ago, I toured the West Country with Malcontents Cricket Club.  Our scorer was an Irishman called Murty.  After a match at Instow in Devon one evening, some of us were eating in a pub.  Murty ordered steak and chips.  When his meal arrived, along with his steak and fries, there were peas on the plate.  Murty exploded. 

“Peas!” He shouted at the waiter.  “I hate the bastards!” 

The place went quiet and everyone in the pub looked at our table.

“You can’t trust peas,” he roared. “Take them away and put my steak on a clean plate.  I don’t want any trace of the little bastards.” 

I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so genuinely angry.

I love eating shrimps and prawns.  However, the two worst gastronomic experiences I have ever had in a restaurant have been when I ordered them but I stayed very composed and never reacted the way Murty did.

Caroline and I were driving across northern France from Calais to Paris.  We arrived in Amiens at around two o’clock in the afternoon and the first thing we did was to find a bar that served food.  I ordered “crevettes, pain brun”.  I can’t remember what Caroline had and neither can she - but we both remember my shrimps. 

I don’t know where those shrimps came from.  It was probably The Bay of Somme and I don’t know if they were graded into three sizes as are the best shrimps in the world that come from Morcambe Bay. 

Some people - strange people - advocate eating the whole shrimp.  They believe that the head and tail have the most flavour and are “texturally exciting”.  Texturally exciting?  Only if you are excited by having shreds of chitin stuck between your teeth are they texturally exciting.  I know of someone who eats them whole, fried in chilli oil with chopped onion and then served cold with a lime wedge.  I will never eat whole shrimps.

Some shrimps are sold whole and intact to restaurants, but most are shelled.  I have no idea why any restaurant ever wants them unshelled. The bar in Amiens where we had lunch was one that did.

When brown shrimps are peeled commercially it is by machine but the smallest grade of shrimp is difficult and more than half of these smallest shrimps need to have the last obstinate pieces of shell removed by hand.  The women who do this job, and it is always women, need to have perfect, sharp eyesight and the fingers of a surgeon.  I have neither.

My shrimps were unpeeled and whole.  Not one of them was more than two centimetres long and I was presented with half a kilogram, or just more than a pound of the little buggers. 

About 25 minutes after our food had arrived Caroline had finished eating and although I had been peeling and eating as fast as I could, I had made no apparent difference to the level of the shrimps in the bowl.

After another half an hour, Caroline asked me to hurry up.  I thought about abandoning the shrimps and ordering a croque-monsieur but I stubbornly persevered.

“At the rate you’re eating them,” she told me, “I think you’ll be eating for at least another hour and it will be dark by then.”

“Why don’t you help and peel some too?” I asked.

“Because I think I’ll have some chocolate gateau and I don’t want to have fishy fingers.”

I never did finish them.  I was still hungry but I was bored.  We left and I bought a chocolate bar on the way out.

There is a restaurant near to where we live that we have visited many times.  Last Friday evening I ordered something on the starter menu that I hadn’t seen before:

Pan-fried tiger prawns with sweet chilli & ginger sauce.

The first ‘alarm bell’ rang when the waiter brought a finger bowl to our table. 

“Oh no!  I’m going to have to peel them,” I said to Caroline.  “Do you remember the shrimps in France?” 

“I certainly do,” she said.  “But tiger prawns are huge and there’ll only be two or three of them.  Shouldn’t be a problem.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong.  Four tiger prawns arrived at the table still in their shells but straight from the pan.  They were scalding hot.  I picked up one and dropped it immediately.  The waiter came by.

“How am expected to eat these?” I asked.       

He was very polite but no help at all.  By the time Caroline had finished her tuna carpaccio, I had managed to decapitate one prawn and pull its tail shell off but eaten nothing.  They were still ridiculously hot.

“Sorry about this,” I said.  “They’re still too hot to touch.”

“I don’t think they sell Mars Bars here,” said Caroline.

We were eating our main courses when the manager came to our table and said that she’d been told that there had been a problem.  I explained and she came out with the predictable response.  

I have said before in, “Trailblazer”, (click to see) that those responsible for dealing with a problem all seem to believe that the best way to diffuse the situation when someone complains is to feign ignorance of the very existence of that problem. 

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “We’ve had that dish on the menu for five years and no one has ever had a difficulty with it before.”

That was not just nonsense, it was a lie.  It had not been on the menu for years because if it had been, I would have seen it and ordered it before. 

Why do restaurants sometimes serve shrimps and prawns with their shells on and intact?  Apart from boiled eggs and some other types of shellfish, I can't think of any food variety which the diner has to prepare at the table before eating.  I only wish I didn’t like shrimps and prawns so much.

I dealt with those situations very quietly and stayed calm throughout.  I can’t imagine how Murty could have reacted.

124. How do you pronounce “irritated” please?

I turned on the television in the early afternoon at the beginning of May to watch coverage of the County Championship cricket match between Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.

When the picture appeared, I was confronted by the face of Matt Allwright.  He is someone whose reports on the television programme “Watchdog” I have found interesting and so I stayed with that channel.  He was hosting a quiz programme called “The Code”.

I managed to watch 25 minutes of it before I either fell asleep or switched to the cricket.  I can’t remember which.  “The Code” is the dullest, most boring and contrived quiz show that has ever polluted afternoon television viewing. 

The highpoint of the programme seemed to be to watch electronic digits 1 to 9 flicker in a small square box and see whether, when the flickering stops, the number that appears is the number that had been chosen by the contestant.  It really is as thrilling as that and it happens every 5 or 6 minutes. 

I used to get more excitement at the playground by anticipating where a roundabout carrying my children would stop and then standing at that place to see if I was right.

“What kind of nut is in the nut in a Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate bar?” was one question.  The answer is almond.

How do you pronounce “almond”?

The days when a linguist might be able to tell someone’s birthplace from the way they pronounced a particular word have gone.  A recent University of Cambridge study has found that more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the southeast do. The cause is unclear, but is probably the result of greater mobility and the influence of broadcast media.

I heard “almond” pronounced in three ways by three people in three minutes. 

Matt Allwright:         “AL-mond”

Contestant:                “AR-mond”

Woman at a desk:    “AWL-mond”

Does it matter?  Yes, it bloody well does matter!  I feel the same irritation when someone says, “AL-mond” as I do with those who have tea and “sconns”.  They are “scones” as far as I’m concerned.  I know that a lot of people disagree with me on that and will challenge me by asking how I pronounce “gone” or "shone".  Fair enough, but I will counter with “bone” and "stone".

English pronunciation is tricky, what with “bough”, “through”, “cough” and “rough” but some pronunciations are just plain wrong and AL-mond is one of those.  I wonder how Allwright pronounces “alms”, the money or food given to poor people?

I suspect that everyone of us pronounces words the way that our parents did.  I can remember being jeered by other pupils on my first day at junior school in Suffolk when I answered a question by saying, “drama”.  

I had just moved to live in Lowestoft from south London and I used a long vowel sound in the first syllable – “drarmer”.   I was laughed at by everyone, including the teacher.   “Oh, it’s drARmer is it?” he sneered.  Bloody Mr Sandford! 

I came across an article that begins with the words:

There’s nothing more irritating to a pedant’s ear than someone saying, “mis-chiev-ious” instead of “mis-chif-erse”.  OK, I’m a pedant - in that person’s view - because I do become irritated but I am unapologetic.  

Every one of the four dictionaries I have looked at says that phonetically, the word “arm” is pronounced ɑːm; “almond” is pronounced ɑːmənd and “alms” is pronounced ɑːmz.  And so, the contestant pronounced it correctly because the first syllable of "almond" is pronounced like "arm".  That’s not difficult is it?

There are other words that I seem to be hearing mispronounced more often.  When she was Secretary of State for Transport, Justine Greening often had to talk about the proposed HS2 rail line.  In an interview in October 2011, soon after she had been appointed, she pronounced the ‘H’ as “haitch”. 

I think that someone must have spoken to her because she always spoke about “High Speed Two” after that.  Never again while she held that office did she ever say, “(h)aitch ess two”.

The word that is the sixth most often mispronounced by UK residents, apparently, is the word “often” itself.  The ‘t’ should be silent but many people say, “off-ten” instead of “offen”.  Similarly, I find it jarring when the ‘t’ in ‘hospital’ is accentuated.  The pronunciation is “hospidtle”.

For five years, Caroline and I lived on Grand Cayman, an island that to all intents and purposes is a suburb of Miami and some American pronunciations, such as leaving the ‘h’ off the word ‘herb’ really niggled me. 

When we were living in Cayman, we found that all indigenous Caymanians, including pastors, teachers and cabinet ministers, always “arks” for something and never did they ‘ask’.  

We got used to hearing the American way of pronouncing words.  I sometimes asked for tomato juice with Worcester sauce even when I didn’t really want one, just so that I could snigger when I heard the bartender say, “ter-may-dow juice and wuss-sess-ter-shy-yer sauce”.

Caroline once had a problem in the University of Miami Hospital Cafeteria.  It was lunchtime; the café was crowded and she was in a long, slow moving queue.

“Could I have a bottle of water please?” she asked.

“Huh?” said the assistant. “Say wah?”

“A bottle of water please.”

“What’s that, honey?”

“A bottle of water.”

“Is that some kind of juice?”

“No, water.”

“Huh?  There’s a line, honey.  Say again.”  

“Water!”

“Honey, we’re kinda busy.  What d’yer want?”

Caroline, remembering that around 70% of Miami is of Hispanic origin, asked for a bottle of “agua”.

“Agua!  Right, okay!  A boddle of wodder.  Why didn’t you say?”

The assistant had finally understood what this strange woman with her funny accent was wanting.  After that, we both learnt to always change the ‘t’ into a ‘d’ whenever we wanted water and to ask for “budder” to spread on our bread.

When Americans say “privacy” they pronounce it with a long vowel so that it becomes, “preyevacy”.  That’s fair enough I suppose but why do they shorten the vowel in “leverage” and pronounce it, ‘levverage’?  And why have so many news reporters here in the UK recently begun to copy them?  That really peeves me. 

“Leverage” is a word that I only ever hear in news reports.  I don’t think I’ve ever used it in conversation and no one I’ve ever talked to has used it either.  I do wish that reporters in the UK said, ‘leeverage’.

When saying “primarily” there is an increasing number of people who stress the second syllable, not the first.  That’s another American influence.

Americans are inconsistent in their pronunciation too.  Caroline’s sister lives on Sullivan Street, close to Houston Street in New York.  The street is pronounced “How-ston”.  The city of the same spelling in Texas is pronounced, “Hoo-ston”.

How words are pronounced doesn’t really matter at all as long as the meaning of what is said is clear.  Pronunciation is like grammar in that even if a ‘rule’ is broken, no damage is done if the listener understands what is meant. 

However, like poor grammar, nonstandard pronunciation can cause irritation and to me it certainly does.