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Sideshoots - associated subjects => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: Bob_Blakey on May 29, 2020, 09:04:08



Title: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: Bob_Blakey on May 29, 2020, 09:04:08
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/met-office-expert-gives-verdict-4171331 (https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/met-office-expert-gives-verdict-4171331)

Towards the end of the specified article the author has referenced something called the 'fern effect'. As somebody who has a significant grounding in Earth Sciences I immediately knew that the Met Office rep was actually referring to the 'foehn effect'.

How standards have slipped!


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: ellendune on May 29, 2020, 09:25:21
I always thought it was spelled "Föhn" so I Googled it and found an article that had Föhn in the title then used foehn in the text.  So I guess you take your pick from those two spellings.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: Bmblbzzz on May 29, 2020, 09:33:50
ö > oe is standard German spelling reform. Similarly with umlaut over a and u > ae and ue. According to a law of about 15 years ago, German publications – newspapers, magazines, examination pupils – are supposed to use the reformed spelling, but I don't think that applies in Switzerland or Austria. In any case, mixing the two spellings in one article is sitting on the fence in the worst way.

I presume the fern effect is something to do with uncoiling...


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: johnneyw on May 29, 2020, 12:08:51
I vaguely recall my mother (who was from Germany) referring to a hair dryer as a foehn.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: JayMac on May 29, 2020, 19:48:55
I thought a foehn was what Inspector Clouseau took voice calls on.



A brilliant scene with the incomparable Peter Sellers. My favourite comic actor. Catherine Schell corpses in this scene. She did so several times in the Return of the Pink Panther, with director Blake Edwards leaving some of them in the final cut. Blake Edwards said in interview many years ago that filming Peter Sellers was equally a delight and a curse. They wasted so much film stock because co-stars were constantly corpsing alongside Sellers.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: johnneyw on May 29, 2020, 20:23:27
Yes, I saw A Shot in the Dark a few days back (still my favourite Clouseau film) which got my mind's ear hearing "foehn" in his voice.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: JayMac on May 29, 2020, 23:01:18
The spinning globe gags...

I remember nearly wetting myself as a kid watching those scenes for the first time.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: johnneyw on May 29, 2020, 23:47:14
The spinning globe gags...

I remember nearly wetting myself as a kid watching those scenes for the first time.


And all the running gags were brilliant to....Dreyfus (Herbert Lom nearly steals the show) somehow managing to  maim himself with various articles such as cigar cutters and letter openers...… and of course the police van running down the same Paris street, sirens blazing, every time Clouseau gets arrested.  Probably the least known of the series but definitely the best.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: stuving on May 31, 2020, 00:13:22
ö > oe is standard German spelling reform. Similarly with umlaut over a and u > ae and ue. According to a law of about 15 years ago, German publications – newspapers, magazines, examination pupils – are supposed to use the reformed spelling, but I don't think that applies in Switzerland or Austria. In any case, mixing the two spellings in one article is sitting on the fence in the worst way.

I presume the fern effect is something to do with uncoiling...

I don't think that was a reform. The 2006 change was a partial retraction of the 1996 reform, but that had been mainly about ss, sss, and friends. Other spellings were tidied up to make them more regular, but only a few with umlauts coming or going.

But the ae, oe, ue spellings were earlier that the umlaut, which came in only with printing. This inserted e (or occasionally other letters) was a common trick in Latin when it was applied to barbaric tongues with weird new sounds. Old English also had the "frontalised" vowels ae (written as a ligature and regarded as a letter in its own right) and ue (for which y was invented, but it soon shifted its sound in English but not in Danish). There had been runes for both and for ue, which fell out of use just as the Latin script took over.

I suspect any change in news media usage was related to compatibility issues with non-German PCs and other devices, and especially their keyboards. In which case the timing is a bit ironic, coinciding with the general adoption of Unicode.


Title: Re: You're A Journalist? Really?
Post by: Bmblbzzz on June 01, 2020, 17:28:49
The use of oe, ae etc to represent umlauts dates back a long time, definitely. I remember learning that at school. I thought one of the reforms was to abolish the use of umlauts and make oe etc compulsory, in areas where the law applied, but I might well be getting these mixed up.



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