Salut!

Minding our language: chill guys, it's a no-brainer at the end of the day

Flossie Malavialle - quand un anglais laborieux a provoqué des froncements de sourcils. Image: Jon Bradley

From my column about words at The National*, looking at the assorted way in which liberties are taken with the English language, from officialese after tragic events to jarring modern clichés ...

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After the terrible accident that killed four people on a ride at an Australian theme park last Tuesday, an official spoke these words to the media: "They sustained injuries that were incompatible with living."

Oddly enough, it took a French woman to draw attention to such a strange and inelegant example of what the English writer George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, might have called officialspeak.

Flossie Malavialle, a singer who lives in the UK and performs exquisitely in English and French on the British folk music circuit, posted on Facebook that it seemed a "really weird" way of saying four people had been killed.

Le Lavandou to Ealing: thank you for the music et au revoir

Why on earth would anyone give up this and willingly return to a gloomy, grey post-Brexit Britain in which, as my great friend Pete Sixsmith put it on the phone today, there is a distinctly nasty atmosphere? Not so much racism, he thought, but xenophobia, a loathing of all foreigners.

No to the burkini, yes to the roar of warplanes. Brigitte Bardot protests ...

Brigitte Bardot comes out with heaps of nonsense, not least of them her occasional declarations of support or sympathy for France's rotten far right.

For once, she has my support when complaining in what has become a stock-in-trade - an angry letter fired off to the mayor - about the "intolerable and violent noise" of warplanes streaking through the skies above Saint-Tropez in preparation for the Free Flight World Masters, an air show held at neigbouring Sainte-Maxime over the weekend.

Her letter to Vincent Morisse, the mayor of Sainte-Maxime, was written while pilots were practising their formations. I suspect her mood was not improved when the show actually took place.

The UKIPisation of Tories, Amber Rudd's Hitlerian moment, the spoof that proved true

This is a quick comment I posted at Facebook in the aftermath of the outrage caused, at least to decent people, by the British home secretary Amber Rudd's vile comments at the Tory conference:

Viewed from France, the rise of UKIP - and the Ukipisation of the Tory party - is among a number of seriously disturbing developments.

The socialists in France are in even greater disarray than in the UK, and at least as unelectable. I foresee Le Pen getting through to the second round next May against whoever the Gaullists (these days called Les Republicains) put up, ie Sarko or Juppe. It is not the sort of option that will have left-minded voters rushing to the polling booths to stop Le Pen as they did with her father in 2002.

Then there's Trump, of course, and the threat from people like Wilders in the Netherlands and assorted racists in Germany and Austria (I almost said neo-Nazis). Even without obvious worries about other world regions, I fear for the political landscape of the West...

Minding our language: from Swarb to Chirac via a rather silly Roselyne Bachelot

For an idea of one of the things that start at 60, read on (and buy the book if you want at Salut!'s Amazon link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/2081386054/salusund-21...

Many years ago, I came across a Church of England clergyman whose duties then involved serving as diocesan press officer. At one point during a minor crisis affecting his diocese, he complained to me that "journalists keep ringing me up". Plumbers objecting to mending leaks, accountants rebuking clients for wanting help on tax returns and teachers playing truant all came to mind.


Now we have a former French minister, Roselyne Bachelot, who earns good money from the media, complaining that the media sought her thoughts on Jacques Chirac, in seriously declining health. From my latest column on words* ...