Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Ferrari jumps the units shark
FURTHER to Feedback’s report on competition between the blue whale and the double-decker bus as metaphorical masses (14 February), we delve into our piling system and wonder, not without pride, whether colleagues on other publications are competing for a mention here. Or is there another explanation for the proliferation of articles that make truly bizarre comparisons, apparently to help readers grasp quantities?
Ralph Platten sends , a Swiss newspaper, reporting that the extinct shark Carcharocles megalodon had the mass of a blue whale. Fair enough. But in case that wasn’t enough, it expands with rare specificity: “or about 61 Ferrari F12 Berlinetta”. Is this a reference to the paper’s owner’s wheels, or what?
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Marketing and arithmetic: not happy together. Tony Richey wonders how Domino’s Pizza’s offer of “savings of up to & over £350” means more than “savings”
Multiple metaphor mayhem
CRAMMING the greatest possible number of metaphorical meta-units into one piece seems to be a pastime for some writers. Eddie Aitken sends , a newspaper, extolling a jet engine from Rolls-Royce, a proud remnant of the UK’s manufacturing base.
Its fan case is “wider than the fuselage of Concorde”; the fan can inhale “up to 1.3 tonnes (more than a squash court) of air every second”; each turbine blade generates as much power as “a Formula 1 racing car”; and “the force on a fan blade at take-off is… the same as nine London buses.” What? No blue whales?
Oceans and oceans of units
SHIPS, for some reason, attract multi-unit extravaganzas. We wondered whether an example from Bloomberg News, comparing the world’s five largest ships to seven organisms and landmarks, was the result of a bet in the office (8 March 2014). James Madden sent about the floating gas-processing platform Prelude that managed to allude to football pitches, Eiffel Towers, Empire State Buildings and Sydney Opera Houses.
Now four readers alert us to descriptions of the Globe, which was briefly the world’s largest freighter. John Medhurst enumerated the metaphors in another : Olympic swimming pools; London buses; pairs of shoes; tablet computers; tins of baked beans; “an office block lying on its side”; football pitches; and vacuum cleaners as a unit of power, nodding to European Union energy-saving regulations that set a ceiling for these. And, he laments, there was “not an elephant in sight”. Then a message arrived from Leo Condron pointing us to the , among other things, that the Globe can carry 955 million clementines; and the , that it can hold 900 million tins of baked beans.
One of these is wrong, unless each fruit has its own silken pillow. We know not which, but we suspect spoon-feeding by a public relations creature with a calculator and a quiet afternoon.
How large are your chips?
WE DO not claim that this august publication is exempt from metaphorical exuberance. Stephen Withall noted a report on how ants munch litter in New York (6 December 2014, p 15). Specifically, “about 60,000 hot dogs or 600,000 potato crisps in a year”. “With the bread roll or without?” asks Stephen. And, either way, “surely even New York doesn’t have crisps as large as 0.1 hot dogs?”
Slither of a name challenge
CRISPS may have appeared adjacent to error in this here column, too (24 January). Seven readers pointed, and some giggled, at the phrase “crispy fried slithers of male human” as an interpretation of “MAN CRISPS”.
We rather hoped that our source had deliberately sneaked this past six pairs of editorial eyes to imply something slippery. Disappointingly, she meant “slivers”. (The Oxford Dictionary does, however, .) This episode thus confirms Grant Hutchison’s suggestion of “a need for a word to designate the sort of spelling error that reveals a person’s accent.” Our source is indeed of Cockney extraction, and the usage does echo the orthography of London novelist Charles Dickens. So what is this word to be? The words sound the same only under particular circumstances, so they’re not homophones as in “which witch?”. Hemihomophones or humophones?
Mis-parsed nomenclature plea
MEANWHILE Andy Johnson-Laird requests a word for “words that are mis-parsed by our minds”. He refers to “mishits”, which he reads as ” ‘mi-‘ followed by the rest of the word”, and the website (which in fact sells pens). Over to you…
Tweet with great care now
A QUICK search of the US and EU trademark registers reveals no legal claims on use of the above-mentioned “penisland”. Take care henceforth, however, when using “Tweet”. The Twitter corporation’s application to extend its protection in the EU to more than 750 contexts (3 January) was . If referring to “Tweet” in connection with pelisses, gabardines or religious meetings, you must now capitalise the word.
Confusing, on the whale
FINALLY, whales are more than metaphorical units – they breed philosophical puzzles too. Phillip Clapham sends a translation – not necessarily much touched by the human hand – of a Japanese Sankei News editorial. It refers to “a slow increase in the number of extinct blue whales”.
Feedback now wants an Aspirin and a cold drink.
