On Blogging and Posh Gs.

I just saw an advert for a correspondence course which included a section on How to Write a Blog. Can you believe that? I had trouble believing it, but that’s definitely what it said. I’ll bet my version is shorter than theirs:

1. Say what you want to say.

2. Don’t worry too much whether anybody reads it, or the voices you hear coming back from the depths of cyberspace asking ‘What on earth is this fruitcake talking about?’

3. Enjoy the experience of learning something about yourself which you didn’t know yesterday. It can be a little chastening, but it’s probably good for the soul.

That’s about it really, apart from the fact that it’s worth getting a Feedjit. It helps you learn the flags of the world, so when somebody asks ‘Where the hell is that flag from?’ you can answer smugly ‘Singapore.’ (But see below.) It also provides fascinating little snippets of information such as the fact that Hanoi is in Ha Noi.

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Non-English persons might be interested to know that posh English persons pronounce the g in ‘Singapore’ as a sort of glottal stop, whereas the low life who come from where I do pronounce it as a g. That, according to the posh folks, makes us inferior. But then we knew that anyway, and pronouncing both g’s in ‘singing’ confirms it absolutely. The received view on ‘blogging’ is that you pronounce the first two g’s as one, and the last as in ‘Singapore.’ It isn’t as complicated as it sounds, once you realise that it’s the preceding n which separates the classes.