London Language:

Originally uploaded by ohna.

There was an interesting discussion recently on London By London about notices announcing 'good service' on the underground. The person who started the discussion contacted London Underground and suggested that it was for us the travellers to decide whether or not the service was 'good'. Surely all they were entitled to say was something like that the service was 'normal'. The LU spokesperson said they had decided 'good service' would be easier for tourists to understand (which made me wonder why they keep talking about 'alighting' rather than getting off the train). This notice seems to me to suggest even more strongly that the service has been critically assessed and judged to be good.

Induction week is a week away so we're expecting this blog to begin to take off in a couple of weeks. One thing we can use it for is to post interesting examples of language usage etc. Here's a comment from Rob Smyth who's doing the Guardian's over by over coverage on the England-Australia cricket match:

Semantics etc Channel 4's quiz question - a multiple-choice affair - has, technically, two right answers. The phrasing is "Which England cricketer played his last Test against Australia at The Oval in 2001?" Now one of the options played his last Test per se, but another played his last Test against Australia. I might pick the second option and then try and sue them and make my millions when they say I get it wrong. Or maybe I could just sell my Northern Uproar CDs on eBay.

File it under 'syntactic ambiguity'

B-)