A sitcom from days gone by when little Ronnie Corbett was harangued my his over bearing mother and every now and then as he was exasperated and perhaps used a word like "blast" he would get the lecture from his mother "Language Timothy!"
And so I briefly looked at the new headlines this morning and wondered what happened to our language that makes headlines such as "OFCOM flooded with complaints" When you get past that particular headline you find that those complaints amount to...... wait for it.... 500. Yes 500 in a population of 67 or 68 million (that we know of) decided they didn't like something enough to "flood" the regulator. Let's say 6 million people saw it. It's way less than 1% complained.
Such is the use of language today that it adds "flooded" when it didn't need to say that and it isn't entirely accurate or properly descriptive of what has happened. People complain all the time about programmes and what was and wasn't said and bias blah blah blah. I do understand that in the days of click bait that it is required for the reader to click deeper to achieve hits and advertising revenue, I get it but, all it does is to do what it did this morning for me. I just went elsewhere for my news and wondered what words they could dream up if it had gone to 600 complaints? "Tsunami!" "Mega Tsunami!"?
Everything these days has an adjective misused or is sensationalized and it's cry wolf stuff. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this but it is used all the time. Climate Change is another area where words are used that rather than discussing the science they sensationalize opinion and misinform and when called out they accuse others of the same actions!
On top of that no one applies common sense anymore to these headlines. I could go on forever about this but just a few crazy things I hear is about how 1.5 Degrees C rise is bad for everything and that CO2 emissions are too high. Travel for 50 miles from my house and I can show you 5 degrees of change, or just wait until a cloud comes over or look at the difference between a cloudy or sunny day. No catastrophic problems occur? CO2 - surely to God everyone knows that CO2 is, to all intents and purposes, plant food. See that tree? Any idea what it's made from? Look it up. A lot of people think that they are made from something in the soil. Why do farmers in greenhouses pump the CO2 up? Because it makes plants grow really well.
Carbon as they bandy the word around is what? Graphite, Diamonds, Coal, I mean what the absolute f**k are they doing other than to confuse the public, obfuscate the facts and not have the scientific debate you need to logically discuss these things. No, they use frightening words and the clues are that there is no debate allowed, no common sense thinking, no demonstrations of how this all actually works, instead, they rely on models and computer models, no real data to speak of. The clues are in those words "Scientists predict", "Experts say", "Might", "Could" words used to grey out facts and obfuscate the masses and people buy it hook line and sinker. Where did our common sense, scientific method and debate (without getting yelled at) go? You cannot have a debate in this country (or rather you have to be careful who you debate with) for fear of getting yelled at. So I was yelled at for my opinions on Brexit and called a "Climate Denier" loudly in a pub, the chap just lost it, I thought he was going to break his blood vessels. You certainly don't want to have seen the scene when I called out the Covid ward overcrowding at a Hospital. Having just visited one in the middle of it all, it was like a ghost town.
The argument was that a certain Hospital was at 100% capacity in its Covid ward. I know that Hospital and knew (long reason why) that there were 42 beds in the ward. So I suggested that there were 42 people being treated in it as there were no other allocated wards. You'd have thought the end of the world had been announced. I don't enter into discussions any more with certain people as they've completely lost the ability to debate and prefer to yell headlines without research at me.
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