Rants

Throw away your business vocabulary books! No need to take those MBA’s! To understand all the meltdown-willful panic-Armageddon-tailspin stuff that’s going on around the world’s financial centres look no further than this email received from a friend today:

Well, after holding the world to ransom the banks have got 2,000,000,000,000 euro out of EU taxpayers and another trillion dollars out of US taxpayers. They seem to have agreed among themselves to end their strike and go back to work, and it’s smiles all round … for now.

That seems to sum it all up very nicely, without any need for that troublesome business vocabulary stuff.

Mixed metaphors are a well-known class. Now we have mixed anecdotes, from a former president of Harvard University no less.

In an interview on Bloomberg, Larry Summers referred to the activities of the US government as being similar to “King Canute plugging the dam”.

Larry—former and possible future US Treasury Secretary—seems to be mixing up two ancient European anecdotes that were not even synchronous:

1. People tried to flatter the Viking King Canute (died 1035) by telling him that even the sea would obey him. Canute said that was nonsense, and to prove it he ordered that his throne be taken to the edge of the sea at low tide. He sat in the throne and “commanded” the sea not to come in. But of course the sea kept coming, eventually forcing Canute to move. Although this proved Canute’s relative humility, it is often misinterpreted as proving his arrogance.
2. In the supposedly Dutch anecdote of years later, Hans Brinker was a little boy who found a small hole in a dyke (not dam, Larry), letting water leak out. Fearing that the hole would get larger and larger, and many people would die from flooding, he plugged the hole with his finger and stayed there throughout the cold night until help came.

When someone who once headed one of the world’s most important universities and may soon head the world’s largest bank (the new soviet-style US Treasury) gets such trivial matters confused, is it any wonder that the US financial system is collapsing? We can only hope that if Larry does become US Treasury Secretary again he will not be prone to mixed currencies.

Or sometimes they write 0:00PM. Or even 12:00AM. Or 12:00PM. I mean…what do they mean? Is it midnight or noon? I mean, AM means before noon, right? And PM means (more…)

Fair enough, you ask the same question to 5 different lawyers and you get 6 different answers. But everyone knows about lawyers. Most of the time there just aren’t enough answers to go round. I mean, how come there are more questions than answers in the world? Or, put another way (more…)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve turned on the tele in the middle of a film. It looks like a good movie so you sit down and start watching it. You don’t know its name but it really grabs you. I wonder who made this film? I must get it on DVD. I wonder what it’s called. And you watch it all the way to the end. Then you watch (more…)

Why is it always the last place you look that you find the thing you’re looking for? Does that happen to you too? You know, you lose something–like your keys or your nail-clippers. You look for them everywhere. You look in the bath room. You look in your pockets. You look under your bed. You look in the living-room. You open all your (more…)

WHEN I WAS A BOY, I LEARNED TO READ. BUT FIRST I LEARNED THE ALPHABET. AS YOU KNOW, THE ENGLISH ALPHABET HAS SMALL (abc) AND LARGE (ABC) LETTERS. THE LARGE LETTERS ARE CALLED “CAPITAL LETTERS”. GUESS WHICH LETTERS I LEARNED FIRST AS A YOUNG CHILD. SMALL LETTERS OR CAPITAL LETTERS? AND WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE ANYWAY BETWEEN SMALL AND LARGE LETTERS? WELL, I’LL TELL YOU. I LEARNED SMALL LETTERS FIRST. AND THE DIFFERENCE? LARGE LETTERS ARE ALL THE SAME HEIGHT. EXACTLY THE SAME. SMALL LETTERS GO UP AND DOWN. SOME ARE IN THE MIDDLE, LIKE x. SOME GO UP, LIKE b. SOME GO DOWN, LIKE p. THAT MEANS THEY ARE ALL DIFFERENT SHAPES AND SIZES. “SO WHAT?”, I HEAR YOU SAY. SO SMALL LETTERS ARE EASIER TO READ. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAW A BOOK PRINTED COMPLETELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS? WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRY READING ONE? PRETTY DIFFICULT, LIKE THE SOLID BLOCKS OF TEXT IN CAPITAL LETTERS THAT MICROSOFT LAWYERS USE TO MAKE THEIR AGREEMENTS DIFFICULT TO READ. LIKE THIS POST, COME TO THINK OF IT. DON’T AGREE? TRY THE TEST.

NATO (N.A.T.O.) is generally considered to be an abbreviation of “North Atlantic Treaty Organization”, an association of European and North American countries formed in 1949 for the defence of Europe and the North Atlantic against the perceived threat of Soviet aggression.

The truth is, however, that NATO stands for “No Action Talking Only”.