I woke up this morning to see two grown men griping and groaning about, wait for it, Comic Sans, on social media. Really, font geekery before breakfast is going too far. If that makes me not a proper Lib Dem for saying that, then so be it. I will not be enslaved by this conformity.
I have to say I don’t really get the problem with Comic Sans, particularly as it’s supposed to be good for people with Dyslexia to read. Clearly I am not the cool kid on the block as my Teenager also has severe issues with that font.
Getting wound up about fonts when there are misplaced apostrophes and your/you’re and its/it’s mix-ups in the world is just silly.
That goes to show how individual our pet hates are and I thought it might be fun on a Friday morning, particularly as some of you who care about this stuff the most are on trains headed to a party training weekend, to share those little things in life that bring us out in hives.
I know I have opened myself up to the possibility of people deliberately misplacing apostrophes all over the comments threads, but I’m sure that the commenters here are far more mature than the senior party figures who have done that on social media.
Way back during the first Holyrood term, MSPs were asked to say what things they were most angry about. Most said very worthy things like poverty and war and injustice. Iain Smith, then MSP for North East Fife, took a different tack, citing Christmas products being advertised in the Summer and Scotrail’s inability to a) keep the trains running on time and b) failing to tell you why your train was late as his. I suspect most of his constituents would have sympathised.
So, let rip with the things that drive you mad. I hope you find it a cleansing experience which makes you feel better for the weekend.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Violent Bonham Carter features on Fake or Fortune?
Have resignations led to a rethink?
High Fell leaflet watch (2)
Two new Makerfield by-election polls gives Burnham 5 and 12 point leads
theakes
Peter Martin
Chloe
Jana
37 Comments
Creme Eggs in shops on December 28th.
Disclaimers on email/twitter that your views are really yours
Lack of knighthood for Tom Baker
“I have to say I don’t really get the problem with Comic Sans, particularly as it’s supposed to be good for people with Dyslexia to read.”
A: It really isn’t.
B: Verdana is the most easily legible by dyslexics
C: Trebuchet & Helvetica are the best compromises on legibility for both Dyslexics and Partially-sighted people
Sources:
http://blog.dyslexia.com/good-fonts-for-dyslexia-an-experimental-study/#.VLjoOyusVkk
http://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/
https://www.actionforblindpeople.org.uk/donate/leave-a-gift-in-your-will/professionals/tips-producing-printed-material-blind-partially-sighted-people/
Pet Hate: Lack of Evidence Citations 😛
It’s the small talk moan of Lib Dems…. letter boxes.
The ones at the bottom of the doors, with a stiff spring and huge brush.
There is a cul de sac in Guildford where the design is to have these letter boxes on every door – all 34 of them!
@tpfkar Tom Baker doesn’t qualify as a pet hate – that is a serious issue that needs sorting:-).
People confusing ‘specific’ with ‘pacific’.
(Stephen Twigg used to do this regularly in speeches at NUS Conference. Never trusted him as a result.)
‘For free’.
First Great Western Trains.
People who say “nucular” instead of “nuclear”. The related word “sumbarine”.
Using data as the plural of anecdote.
The peculiarly Spanish concept of the bank not being open after 2.30pm.
Also:
The word ‘sheeple’ just drives me up the wall, both because of the sound of it and the connotations.
Group projects where one person hasn’t prepared anything for our discussion meeting
Easy open packets that aren’t easy to open because the part for opening it just tears off without making any difference
Printing off documents to sign them and then having to scan them back in (which is a whole world of hassle when you don’t own a printer or a scanner)
My pet hate is ‘whataboutery’.
Not the word ‘whataboutery’ – people actually taking part in whataboutery.
Principal and principle ( a lot of Sandwell officers guess wrong).
Having to make the coffee these days. Martyn used to do it so it was not always my job before meetings.
I write documents in 14pt Ariel. Council chose this at request of then CE and me ( both with dodgy sight).
Closure of my wonderful butcher.
The illusion that three full reactor meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011 have simply gone away and resolved themselves.
As well as nucular (George W Bush), mispronunciations in the David Owen, Tony Blair, Nick Clegg tradition eg p’litical.
There are one or two other commonly used words in this tradition (I will add when I remember them!)
I have a number of them:
– To “reach out” to someone, (supposedly) meaning to contact them; How can anyone possibly use this term for this purpose?
– “Issue” used as a euphemism for problem, fault or difficulty;
– “Impact” used as a verb;
– “Appeal” used without “against”, as in to “appeal a judgement”;
– “Protest”, used in the same way;
– “Leverage” used instead of, well, “use”;
– Seeing Ed Balls on the TV, especially early in the morning.
– Corporate team building away-days.
Oh and I too hate those letterboxes with very stiff brushes you can’t put leaflets through.
My pet hate: “pre-prepared”. Also “pre-planned”. If post-X doesn’t work, then pre-X is a tautology. Oh, and 6 year anniversary for 6th Anniversary.
On Dyslexia: there are also a couple of fonts specifically designed for dyslexics. The use tricks like making a ‘d’ look different from a reflected ‘b’, for example. Read Regular and Lexia Readable http://www.dyslexic.com/fonts Why does that site make links invisible? For email, use plain text: that way the recipient gets to choose the font.
Facebook. All of it.
RC: I appeal your injunctions, with whom I have a serious issue; you would forbid me from leveraging the trendingest corporate style, such that it would negatively impact my paradigm. How can I reach out and protest these decisions to you?
‘ridiculous’ spelt with an ‘e’ (‘rediculous’). There’s even a website that rants on about it.
Use of the word ‘appraise’ when the speaker/writer really means ‘apprise’ eg ‘I was appraised of the situation when I arrived at the crash scene.’ (to appraise = to evaluate; to apprise = to inform)
The false claim that the religious organisations running ‘faith’ schools contribute 10% of their capital cost.
The expression “going forward”. Everyone uses it now, especially politicians and media pundits. It seems to have replaced the much clearer “in the future”. Then there is its tautological close cousin “planning forward” – how do you plan backwards?
Food Fascism, you know those endless news items linking some ambiguous research to the dietary hobby horse of minor celebs and end up as quasi moral crusades against MSG or whatever.
Caron – sorry to raise something so important and serious on a fun thread. Can I replace with “being told loudly to return items to the bagging area when I’ve just put them there” 🙂
Totally agree with Kelly-Marie on those pesky ankle-height letterboxes, I have hundreds in my ward and my knees can’t cope with many more delivery rounds.
All of the examples on RC’s well-chosen list. Plus the following:
– ‘Over-exaggerated’ / ‘over-simplistic’
– ‘Past experience’
– ‘Very unique’, ‘completely unique’ etc
– ‘Hard-working families’, ‘long-term economic plan’, ‘prudence for a purpose’, ‘stronger economy in a fairer society’, ‘the envy of the world’ (usually in relation to the NHS) and other vacuous and clunking political slogans
– ‘It is what it is’
– ‘Thinking outside the box’, ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘safeguarding policies’, ‘drill down’, ‘deliverables’ and nearly all management jargon and psychobabble
– ‘Giving 110%, 120%, 200%’ or other inflated figure
– The amount of ‘moving forward’ and ‘going forward’ we are all exhorted to do gets rather tiring
– Subscribing to a view (although this one amuses me more than grates, my grandfather used to say it)
– Gratuitous use of exclamation marks
– The use of the plural pronoun when the antecedent is ‘each’, ‘anybody’, ‘somebody’ etc; and mixing up singulars and plurals in the same sentence, eg ‘the company agreed to do more to train their staff’
– The irritating habit of conjoining separate words – ‘anymore’, ‘thankyou’, ‘alot’, ‘alright’ (ugh)
– Beginning a statement with ‘look, the thing is…’ (although we hear less of this since Tony Blair went global)
– Routinely beginning a sentence or answer to a question with ‘so’
– Being told repeatedly that my call is important while keeping me on hold interminably, usually with musical accompaniment for extra frustration
– The routine ignorance and misuse of statistics in the media and public debate – making unsubstantiated assertions, mixing up different time periods, providing no reference point or baseline for comparison, citing absolute numbers with no context eg population/country size/size of economy/starting point/historic norms etc
– In economic policy debates, conflating flows and stocks, deficits and debt, turnover and profit; failing to grasp the fundamental notion of trade-offs; believing in the lump of labour, just prices and all sorts of other fallacies
I knew you’d come up with some good stuff here – some of it makes me wince.
@tpfkar I think these automatic checkouts could have a whole post of their own. It’s trying to get the carrier bags to open – not that that’s such a problem now we all bring our own rather than pay 5p – that winds me up. I think they should also have a much better “voice”. Holly from Red Dwarf, for example, would be much better.
I agree with Alex Sabine’s list 110%.
I am sure I may well have been guilty of at least one of them in the past.
I’ve just come across one of my pet hates: talk about a “Christian-Judeo” culture. Some centre-right German politicians are saying it and Farage likes to spout about this on Fox News. I’ve rarely heard of a term so dumb and it plays into the hands of the extremists.
Sorry to lower the tone. 🙂
Well, who isn’t guilty of the occasional lapse?
Remember Orwell’s six rules for writing. The first five abhorred cliches, verbosity, passive voices etc, but the final one was: Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barborous’. Advice which Orwell himself often followed.
@ David 1
“How can I reach out and protest these decisions to you?”
Social media is the best way but make sure your data is correct.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if a football manger or TV talent show judge said “the lads/you gave it 111.3%”
‘VAT free’ offers.I should hope they’re paying the VAT; what they’re really doing is that they are giving a discount of 16.67%.
But it implies that they can get business by making customers co-conspirators in tax fraud.
Documents that are wholly in one of those fonts that are supposed to look like handwriting.
Impractical letter boxes – not only the ones that are too low or too stiff, but also the one’s that are too hard to find. ( I fantasize about adding a £1000 per annum council tax surcharge to dwellings equipped with impractical letter boxes. Another dream is putting a torn-up envelope and cheque through a vicious letter box, to make the addressee think they’ve missed out on real money.)
Buildings with flats sharing a single letter box and therefore having their hallway floor covered in muddy correspondance.
Television channel time devoted to lottery draws.
Virgin, BT and TalkTalk writing to me every month with complex offers with lots of small print and tempting introductory tarriffs.
@Hannah Bettsworth
‘The peculiarly Spanish concept of the bank not being open after 2.30pm.’
Wind back to small town Norway, some decades ago, when the only way to get local currency was to take your traveller’s cheques into a bank and visit two desks. Most banks shut at 1 pm, but the one in the town I was in shut at noon. Of course, they had opened at 8 am.
That our Liberal Democratic Party in government has failed to resolve the fact that gender-variant folk—be we (transgender, transsexual, cross-dressers, or intersex) covert or overt, UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 preferred gender certificated or not—can be discriminated against with impunity on Bermuda and the UK’s other British Overseas Territories…
Brenda Lana Smith R.af D.
Founder of “Stand up for Gender-Variant People’s Rights on Bermuda…”
https://www.facebook.com/groups/83427199552/
“Television channel time devoted to lottery draws.”
Ian Sanderson makes a very good and serious point.
Why do I as a TV licence payer (forced to be so by law) have to subsidise Camelot which is a private monopoly?
If the BBC wants to help out charities they could cut their top two hundred “executive” salaries to the level of the salary of an MP – thus saving £150,000 per person.
If I have done the arithmetic correctly that would result in an instant £3 million donation to charity.
Better still abolish the Licence Fee and make the fat cats at the BBC work for a living.
John
I wasn’t wholly having a go at BBC 1, as there are plenty of other places where this happens, both in the UK and abroad. They irritate me too.
I suppose on BBC 1 part of my irritation, is that, unlike nearly all the other channels available to me, the eight or so BBC channels are not interrupted by ad breaks. This makes the licence fee at about £150 p.a. much more palatable than the £700 p.a. or so that Virgin charge. One thing that did change in the BBC about 30 years ago was the Thatcherite assumption that they should no longer rely on internal management talent and the public service ethos, starting with getting John Birt (complete with a ‘tax-efficient’ way of paying his remuneration.)
I suppose I should have added to my list: TV competitions which are so easy that they are clearly games of chance. (Channel 5 has plenty of those.)
That our party champions equality yet in government has failed to resolve the fact that gender-variant folk—be we (transgender, transsexual, cross-dressers, or intersex) covert or overt, UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 preferred gender certificated or not—can be discriminated against with impunity on Bermuda and the UK’s other British Overseas Territories…
Ian Sanderson (RM3) 17th Jan ’15 – 1:49pm
Ian, You make several good points . I did rather stretch your original point to have a go at the BBC.
Although I have to admit to sometimes being highly amused by the sort of “Quiz” that asks a multiple-choice question such as. —
Is David Cameron ? —
1. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ?
2. A Central African Country ?
3. An excuse to go out and make a cup of tea ?
Whoever writes this stuff has a unique talent.
Broadcasters saying “ahead of” instead of “before.” “Just shy of” gets me too, favoured by BBC News 24 presenters when telling us the time!
How about our pet loves though Caron? Maybe we could share our thoughts on that to get 2015 off to a positive start? Or is that a bit too risky? !
“As Liberals/As a liberal” – It seems to speak to a weakness in the definition creed that people are so unsure of its core values they feel they buttress the worth of their own words by plastering “liberal” to everything, not least because no-one will be able to argue with them other than to say; “that’s not how i define liberalism!”.