Charles on… anything that comes along

I’m editing pieces ahead of a two-week break, so I’m doing lots in a rush.

And I keep coming across the word “dodgy”. In a quote: “If it’s not fraudulent, it is at least dodgy,” he says.

Or: “it uses dodgy websites”.

What’s the linguistic distinction that we’re drawing here? Are we saying that dodgy is legal, only in danger of veering into illegal? I don’t get it. I’m tempted to just replace it (out of quotes) with “fake”, and to see if the quoted people can’t be made to be more precise.

Ian Hargreaves, as editor at The Independent, once put out a ban on “Hey” - as in “Hey, but that’s how it is.” It adds nothing to the sentence but a spurious familiarity. I’m thinking that dodgy doesn’t really tell you anything about the object or activity being described. Either it’s illegal, or it’s not, surely; and either it’s done with the intention of defrauding people, or not. Intention counts. You can’t accidentally come up with a scheme that relieves people of their money against their will.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Yeah, that might be a bug in Microsoft Word. Just, you know, guessing (20 March 2006; score: 28.7%)
• The guaranteed way to avoid being phished; and the mobile business's best news in a decade (14 April 2005; score: 26.5%)
• Could you explain the question first, Clippy? (1 October 2004; score: 24.99%)

• Prize For Stupidity

  Somewhere in the depths of North London, a young man falls over and injures his leg. He thinks it might be broken. He hobbles to the telephone and dials the number of his local taxi firm. Yes, that’s a real taxi, not one of our Big White ones. He then limps outside to wait for the taxi. Ten minutes later, it arrives, and he eases himself into the back seat.

  “Where to?” asks the cab driver, starting the engine and pulling off.

  “North Middlesex Hospital, please,” says the man. “The A+E department. I think I’ve broken my leg!”

  “Oh my god!” says the taxi driver. “You can’t be getting in taxis with a broken leg. Hold on a minute!”

  The consistently enjoyable NeeNaw (say it out loud) blog. The really scary thing is that this is true. The only amazing thing is that it didn’t happen in south London - I’d have found that easier to believe. (Seen at Nee Naw)

• The Derivative Myth
  

  Has the level of self-regard in the blogosphere really reached such dizzying heights that it can’t acknowledge the work that traditional media does on behalf of the rest of us? Yes, the newspaper business isn’t as lucrative as it once was (although it’s still pretty lucrative). And it doesn’t seem as exciting and relevant as it once was. But newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less. Between them, for instance, the Times and the Post have literally hundreds of trained professionals whose only job it is to sift through the mountains of information that come out of the various levels of government and find what is of value and of importance to the rest of us. Why Where would we be without them? We’d be lost.

  Malcolm Gladwell - not normally a person one thinks of with a green eyeshade on - making the point about where blogs find their food. (Seen at gladwell.com)

• Dude, Kyle’s Not Here
  

  There are some really strange data, particularly in the search terms with which people find my site.

  I mean, sure, lots of people google, say, etrade (6.73% of all visitors on Friday, which means that they really, REALLY shouldn’t have screwed with me), and often people will just google wil+shipley (3.85%) instead of remembering my non-mnemonic url (wilshipley.com).

  But, how about the guy who was looking for custom+pimp+puppets? My first thought was, why’d this link to my site? And then, “What’s a pimp puppet? Is it just a puppet of a pimp? If so, why the hell does someone want one?” (Unless it’s named Frank.) The really bizarre part is the person didn’t find what he wanted, so he followed up by googling custom+made+pimp+puppets. Vive la diffrence!

  Wil Shipley (of Delicious Library) with a stellar runthrough of the weird Google searches that bring people to his site. BTW, does Kyle Orton like drinking? And where can I find naked women pirates? Wil knows. (Seen at Call Me Fishmeal.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Better cochlear implants; the power law of homelessness and pollution (13 February 2006; score: 67.88%)
• Blimey, how many people did Newsnight try before they got to me? (4 February 2008; score: 58.46%)
• The Spartacus approach to beating comment spam (9 November 2004; score: 52.05%)