cloudsoup

I started drawing again on this holiday. I’ve drawn since I was a kid – my father, a skilled draughtsman, taught me the basics. I was quite into cartooning; Searle, Scarfe, you know, the good ones. I let it drift once I became disheartened by realising I wouldn’t be as good as those guys.

But I do enjoy it. So I’m going to keep it up and I’m half-determined to post drawings on this blog.

Must do some research into this sometime. You might have expected the BBC, being our world-renowned national broadcaster, to employ website editors who can write English properly. Not so much.

Just recently there was the fare/fair cock-up (in a piece on A Levels, ironically) and now there’s this peice on Laura Dekker‘s bid to sail around the world. The title reads:

‘Teenager Dekker ‘sets sail’ on world record bid

and in the second paragraph says,

Her manager said she had left in a very good mood despite calm conditions, but did not want to speak to the media.

Firstly, the title. Why put ‘sets sail’ in quotes like that? ‘Sets sail’ is a perfectly well-known figure of speech; and yes it has a delibverate double meaning here because Dekker is physically setting sail; but unless the editor thought it a good idea to draw our attention to what he thought was a clever double meaning so that we could admire him, the quotes make the headline read as though it was written by  someone not used to writing. A kid, who uses quotes and exclamation marks,  and lols.

Then there’s the non sequitur in that second paragraph which seems to suggest that Dekker’s mood might have been expected to be excellent if sea conditions had been terrible and that under the boring circumstances of  plain sailing (sorry, that should be ‘plain sailing‘, of course) she’s bearing up well by nevertheless being in a good mood.

I’d have thought the Beeb could do better.