Charles on… anything that comes along

I have Radio 4 on a fair amount, and I’m amazed how often people say things that so neatly don’t say what they mean to say. They’re not quite malapropisms, but they’re pretty close.

Just two from this morning:

On Today, someone being interviewed about the IRA’s “promise” to shoot Robert McCartney’s killers: “Ah, now, you’re over-exaggerating there.”

A woman being asked whether using a pint glass is seen as somehow not ladylike. “Well, you can have a pint glass, and men won’t, you know, turn their nose down at you.”

You can see that in both cases there’s been a collision of two ideas trying to get out of the mouth at the same time: overegging it and exaggerating it; and “turn up their nose” and “look down their nose”.

This is quite apart from the many times when people use bureaucratese to try to mask the fact that they’re not very clever, and not very sure of their position or argument, and instead try to invoke the multi-syllabic rubbish that they deal with all the time.

Examples welcomed.

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Nice little correction spotted on Reuters:

MAR. 9 5:05 P.M. ET In a March 8 story about Sony Corp. competing with Apple Computer Inc. in the digital music player market, The Associated Press erroneously reported the starting price for Sony’s new line of Walkman digital music players. The players start at $90 for 256 megabytes of memory, not $130, which is the price of the 512-megabyte version. By comparison, Apple’s Shuffle is priced at $99 for 512 megabytes.

Ah. So $30 more for the Sony version (which may or may not play MP3s; anyone know? Or care?) than the market-dominating version. Seriously, is Sony not a larger company than Apple? Can’t it get access to more volumes and better prices? I continue to be amazed by how this company continues to not get it.

And it puts a slightly different glaze on events like this from the day before: Apple’s share tumbled nearly five per cent yesterday in reaction to the news featuring Sony’s nine new music players.

“Hello, sir. Would you like to buy back those Apple shares you sold last night?”

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