h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We still have orders coming in by fax. Hand-written.

You know when you come out of a supermarket or similar and somebody accosts you on behalf of a charity? I think that's annoying and they tend not just to be tin shakers these days but they want you to sign up to make regular donations on account. Today it was the Battersea Dog's and Cat's home collecting at the local B&M. You can only help so many charities in this way, and you hear about contact details of donors being passed around, and people ending up swamped. Another timely warning about the dangers of open banking. Only today I got a message from Oxfam telling me how much my gift aid donations were saving them. Wonderful charities these no doubt but they're not all, and there are always tales of crooked ones that only help the collectors themselves. Apparently I'd agreed somewhere to be kept updated by Oxfam, I'm sure they're right but I honestly didn't know I had. Shame really but when scammers can empty your bank account you need to be careful. And I felt so sorry for the young people touting for signatures, no doubt they're on commission but a pretty soul destroying occupation I should think.

It wasn't PAT Tester but that's another one.

But.

I'VE CALLED MY BANK AND HAD AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE WHICH ASKED IF I WANTED TO BE GIVEN A NEW PIN NUMBER!!!!!!!

PP.

PH: people who re-shelve merchandise at the department stores and super markets in the wtong place.

Related PH: when supermarkets change their layouts.

<BB<

Store workers have a term for merch that's been reshelved... I wanna say it's called "drift"? I know the term for merchandise that is shoplifted, pilfered, expired, etc. is called "shrinkage".

That reminds me of another Petty Hate – 'shrinkflation'. Where goods are sold in sneakily smaller packages so you don't get as much.

<BB<

Ugh, the worst example is how Toblerone bars now have gaps between "peaks".

Unforgivable.

Oh those stupid new made up words.

I came across one moments ago. I'm having a parcel delivered and as is the modern way, I can watch it's progress and even influence it's delivery. But not to any useful degree of course. I work in the week so I'll have it delivered on Saturday then.

Oh no. Hang on. That's not an option. (The Royal Mail deliver on Saturdays).

So they can leave it with a neighbour. One on holiday. One with children so in and out.

I can pick it up from the depot. But that's 36 miles away. The shop was only 41 miles away. So I would have paid £5 for it to be shifted 5 miles closer to home.

I can have it delivered to work then. No. That's not an option.

Oh. That word.

My parcel is at the 'sortation' depot.

PP.

Sortation is a perfectly good word for the act of sorting, even of letters. I think it only grates because ‘sorting office’ is the established word for that kind of building. Clearly it’s a bit different, as they appear not to want to deliver them after they’ve sorted them.

I think I prefer ‘sorting depot’ if they intend to sort, then store them.

With the abolition of Greek and Latin as mandatory secondary school courses, English grammar has been drifting, not least with neologisms with mixed roots becoming more prevalent, rather than older system where a neologism with mixed roots was considered ungrammatical.

Sortation is a perfectly cromulent word.

My browser spell check doesn't think that sortation is a real word.

PP.

Your spell check needs to be embiggened to recognize how cromulent a word sortation is.

That's right. And while we're on the subject, in English it's perfectly acceptable to boldly split all the cromulent infinitives you goddamn want.

I'm so enjoying this banter that it seems rather a let-down to butt in with my PH.

I've probably said it before, but while we're on the subject of the arrangement of departments in the supermarket: Why O Why have they all started re-arranging so that the fruit and vegetables are the first thing you encounter?

Am I supposed to put my lettuces and bananas in first, and then place the boxes/bottles of washing powder and tins of tomatoes on top of them? Or am I supposed to wheel my trolley round to the end of the rows, start from the back, work to the front, and then wheel back through the shop again to the checkouts?

PH: untrained baggers at the supermarket who pile cans and bottles atop bread and pastry, place wet green groceries with dry goods, etc..

You know some other radastically cromulent things you can do in english that the academic stuffshirts try to repress for no good reason? You can gelify two entirely different words together to make one single fantasmagasmic word.

And admittedly results vary but there's no reason I couldn't, say, noun a verb straight into nounverb territory without a second iotathought, which is why Ghostbusters is such a slimingly cromulawesome movie and William Shakespeare is such a brilliant wordsmithing corpse.

English is the best.



But that actually leads me to another petty hate: Stuffshirted academic Engrish teachers who really should know all this but inexplicably continue to perpetuate misunderstandings of how languages work by frankensteining the structural limitations of latin on top of its far more flexible and impressive grandnephew language.

Because the mandatory latin instruction you used to receive in secondary school as an archaic holdover from the Middle Ages was a load of craptastic nonsense that greatly inhibited the creative wordplay that entire generations might otherwise have learned if they had been raised to be men with "little latin and less greek."



But I digress.

You should write something for the post.