...omne animal triste.I was doing okay until my Dad pointed out this dyspeptic article in the Times.
Some brand-new Department of State concludes from intensive research that Nigel Slater's recipes can be followed by 10-11 year olds (Entry Level 3 literacy) while Nigella Lawson's chocolate fudge cake defies all human understanding.
It's all about norks, from what I gather. Not cake.
Given the failure of the various Departments of Education in the past couple of decades to educate kiddies even to late-Victorian levels of literacy and numeracy, creating a new Department (DIUS) to correct for the incompetence of the first (DCSF) brings a welcome Boulting Brothers comedy touch to this our Soviet-Union-on-Sea.
No wonder the merry gentlemen in the pic are beaming. And their salaries, expenses and pensions don't cost the taxpayer that much, relatively.
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Which leads me to a spot of seasonal smogging - SMOGging as in "Simple Measure of Gobbledygook", a formula which calculates a 'readability' grade from the ratio of polysyllables to words in a chunk of text. My comments on Nigella's norks etcetera scored 12.87, good for a high school graduate / Time magazine reader (note to self - must try harder).
The paragraph above scored 15.85 (some college / New York Times).
I wish you endless post-Festive fun with the SMOG calculator.
2 comments:
What a pile of poo. I just posted "polysyllables are fabulous" 12 times and got a rating of 29.83.
Wasn't it Einstein (or somebody) who said it was a sign of genius to make a complex subject seem simple? (or something)
It is a bit poo, really. I should have looked for a more entertining toy.
But I am sooooooo ill, able to do little more than lie in bed and listen to the radio.
Every time the verdammt Archers starts, I pray the good Lord to gather me to His bosom. Proves there's no God, that I end up listening to the Archers.
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