The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
11:19am on Sunday, 7th January, 2018:
Rant
A BBC news article about the current heatwave in Australia includes the following sentence: "Severe fire warnings were issued for the greater Sydney area and total fire bans were put in place across the city."
What's a "severe fire warning"? Is it a warning about severe fires (a severe-fire warning)? If so, what's a severe fire? Or is it a warning about fires that's more severe than normal warnings about fires (a severe fire-warning)? If so, what's a severe warning?
I'm guessing that the warning is that there is a very high risk of fires, with "very high risk" equating to "severe" in threat-level language. That would make it a severe fire-warning, then.
There's a sign in Colchester, near some roadworks, which reads "temporary bus stop". Is that a stop for temporary buses (a temporary-bus stop) or a bus stop that's temporary (a temporary bus-stop)?
Our predecessors didn't invent the practise of hyphenating compound adjectives and compound nouns for no good reason.
I once read an article which referred to the wing-commander on the right of the formation as being the "right wing commander".
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2018 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).