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The Engine Room
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A blog about English language use, publishing and the media in general – brought to you by a sub-editor (copy editor) on a weekly UK magazine and his former chief sub.
If you have a question about vocabulary, grammar or punctuation, why not ask
Recent Posts Tagged With 'metro'
Scraper + scoop + ladle = scrudle
On Friday, Metro ran a story about the Scrudle, a plastic device which is "said to allow cooks to seamlessly scoop up equal amounts of ingredients without any spillages".It added:Scrudle, which rhymes with strudel and is a mixture of the words scrape...
Art criticism from Metro
According to Metro, a paper not renowned for its understatement, this portrait of Gordon Brown's wife Sarah "would struggle to make it on to the fridge door if it was painted by a three-year old".I'm fairly confident that any three-year-old producing...
Headlines: \'Major massacres\'
On Friday, I walked past a folded, discarded copy of Metro and caught the first deck of its two-deck front page headline. It read: "Major massacres".This left me wondering what massacres it was referring to, and when exactly a massacre became a "majo...
\'Nick Griffin, you f****** w*****\'
Replacing swear words in a news story with a string of asterisks may protect the sensibilities of easily offended readers but it doesn't always aid understanding. For example, Metro's front page lead today begins:British National Party leader Nick Gr...
Juxtaposition: cocaine deaths / adult cot death
Sarah pointed out this recent Metro front cover to me:The lead headline reads: Cocaine deaths jump by a fifthThe headline above the photo of the teenage girl reads:'Angel' who died in her sleep at 16At first glance, Sarah assumed that the girl had di...
'You can't even trust the establishment'
From the BBC News website yesterday:More than 1,000 police officers and staff who misused corporate credit cards will not be punished, a police watchdog has decided.The Metropolitan Police Authority found 1,183 Met employees used the American Express...
Paws for thought
There's a bizarre little story in today's Metro, under the headline "Cats know their right from left". Here it is in full:Cats can tell the difference between left and right, scientists say. And like humans, male moggies are more likely to use their ...
Credit crunch or recession?
Today's Metro includes the following news headline:Bag snatchesrise as creditcrunch bitesPerhaps someone should let the paper know that 'credit crunch' isn't a synonym for 'recession'.Tellingly, the body copy doesn't mention 'credit crunch' once but ...
What's wrong with cow paté?
So yesterday I read this in English for Journalists (Second Edition), by Wynford Hicks:If your house style includes accents, make sure that you use them consistently. For example 'paté' and 'emigré' are howlers; they should be pâté and émigré.A...
Whites searched 'for race balance'. Did they find it?
My first thought on seeing Metro's main front page headline today was: 'So did they find it?'As it turns out, 'whites' is the object, not the subject, of the headline (which is written in the passive voice).(UPDATE 19/07/09: As Garik points out in th...
Terry Pratchett and Peach Pie Street
The novelist – and knight – Terry Pratchett is a former sub, and so here at The Engine Room we follow his career with some interest (as regular readers of the blog will already know).On Monday I spotted the following in the Metro free paper (clic...
