prevention is better than cure?

This caught my eye en route to the village this morning:

What about igualdad & libertad?

It was on the side of a lorry parked down by the river. Muprespa are some kind of mutua de accidentes, but I don’t think the slogan reads quite the way they want it to.

a number of questions

Or, perhaps, a question of numbers.

A headline in today’s El Mundo says that 4,158 million euros has been lost in the last ten years due to political corruption. Except, it being Spanish, it doesn’t say it quite like that:

The Spanish use “million” in the plural after a number, giving phrases like seis millones rather than “six million”. They also use a full stop as the thousands separator and a comma where we use a decimal point.

house of cards

The second image that I wanted to talk about from my conversation with the poet Joan Margarit dealt with the writing process. (See yesterday’s post for the first.)

Joan described how the poet often writes early drafts of a poem to include more than is needed. We cram stuff in just to see if it fits. Subsequent drafts entail removing bits carefully, like pulling out cards one by one from a card house.

When the structure comes tumbling down, you know you’ve found the point at which you should have stopped.

it rings a bell

This headline has caught my attention:

...with bells on

Whether it was in any way connected with Global Handwashing Day, which fell a few days ago, I don’t know.

It was of course the use of the verb “ring” that caught my eye. I’m pretty sure that even in American English that should be “wring”.

Actually, there was far more to set me thinking in the article, which started off:

parenthetical pedantry

The more I read on-line, the more I think the mathematicians have it right. The meaning of 4+3*6 is perfectly well defined. You have to do the multiplication first.

If you want to force the addition to be be done first, you just slip in some parentheses: (4+3)*6.

Sadly, text isn’t like that. And with the internet encouraging writing by all and sundry, and forcing hurried writing by those who should know better, it’s easy to produce potentially ambiguous statements like this, from a piece about the need to encourage social inclusion by reading, on the London Book Fair site:

Not only are those who read less likely to be divorced, but they are less likely to smoke and be unemployed

My original reading of the first phrase parsed “those who read less” as a unit, and the phrase apparently claimed members of this group were “likely to be divorced”.