{"id":603,"date":"2010-12-02T21:59:06","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T20:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=603"},"modified":"2011-03-29T09:48:40","modified_gmt":"2011-03-29T08:48:40","slug":"who-should-wear-the-dunces-hat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=603","title":{"rendered":"Who should wear the dunce’s hat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s easy to detect the Telegraph<\/em>‘s disgust when reporting that a Head teacher has been forced to apologise for an error-laden report<\/a> – it is, after all, the paper of Simon Heffer<\/a>. The journalist duly comments that the fourteen errors ‘indicate a need for the teacher to be sent back to primary school’. <\/p>\n

More surprising, for me, was the content of the discussion thread that followed the article, in which many of the commenters end up tearing into the Telegraph<\/em>‘s journalist and editors – and even each for misplaced pedantry. Here’s a taste – you can read them if full here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nThere’s also the cretinous use of a comma instead of a full stop, right after the “8’s”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So says ‘Col Dee’ (hardly diplomatic language – oops, we’ve just learnt from Wikileaks<\/a> how diplomats really<\/em> talk).<\/p>\n

‘Dunces’ hats’ has an apostrophe. Several hats belong to several dunces or possibly Telegraph reporters….
\n“7’s and 8’s” should not have apostrophes. There is no ownership, just a description of a group. The Telegraph should have spotted this….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This provoked ‘micha2600’ to complain:<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the readers of the DT seem to have lost their grasp of reality and appear to prefer navel gazing and discussing minutii….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which elicited the response:<\/p>\n

Actually, minutii (sic) should be minutiae as it comes from a Latin rather than a Greek root.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At least ‘osaycanuck’ had the good grace to add:<\/p>\n

Should that error detract from the meaning of what the writer was trying to say? IMHO, no.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The use of the abbreviation IMHO<\/em> in the response here is hardly the norm for, say, a report to parents, though part of the lingua franca<\/em> of online conversation. It’s all a matter of register (as teacher might say) isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daily Telegraph gets heated about errors in an email<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[103,112,81],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-words","tag-grammar","tag-heffer","tag-spelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":732,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions\/732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}