Sunday 6 February 2011

'Scribble'

Richard Littlejohn said on Friday:

Gloucester City Council is sending out census forms in no fewer than 56 different languages.

Technically, they're leaflets to help complete the census not the forms themselves, which are in English.

But then he adds this charming statement:

...why waste time and public money printing leaflets in 56 ­different languages, many of them scribble?

8 comments:

  1. It's not so much contempt for the languages as a complete inability to imagine something making sense to somebody else if he doesn't understand it himself.

    That said, Arabic script is bastard-hard to learn and very, very squiggly.

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  2. He doesn't say, on purpose, that these are merely available to people should they need them. Good attempt at whipping up a bit of frenzy though.

    Is he trying to give them impression that everyone is going to be bombarded with 56 different forms? I imagine some of the less requested languages will be printed on demand at an extremely low cost to the council, probably less than it costs to buy his crappy paper.

    Anyway, why does he moan so much? I'm sure at his house (in a gated community in Florida) he is more than used to multilingual documents being available. Spanish is practically an unofficial second language in that part of the States, a country which even changed his mother tounge in order for it to be learned easier by immigrants!

    As a side note, it seems his personal website domain registration has recently expired and as such www.richardlittlejohn.com seems to be up for sale!

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  3. I wonder what Latin print looks like to people who have never seen it before. All neatly divided up into bite-sized portions, rather like cutting up food for toddlers who haven't yet quite mastered the art of eating?

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  4. I wonder what Littlejerk's angle on THIS will be.

    I mean...American-based, UK tax-avoidance, politically biased media, BBC, outrage...it must push a lot of his buttons.

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  5. And he probably thinks that when people speak other languages it's just nonsensical noises.

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  6. Why does the Daily Mail waste so much of its readers' time and money printing the outpourings of Richard Littlejohn's 56 synapses, much of it scribble?

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  7. I wonder if he uses the phrase 'Bongo Bongo Land' on occasion.

    http://tinyurl.com/4j55vqe

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  8. A few months ago I complained to the BBC about disparaging remarks about a non-English language on - of all programmes - Round Britain Quiz [Radio 4]. The BBC's response was unhelpful - "we cannot control off-the-cuff remarks"

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