inbox
mime artist trying to communicate by means of a podcast. Jonathan Sale, London
Journalists should know what words mean We journalists are supposed to be good with words, so why do so many seem not to know the meaning of the words they’re using? ‘Pandemic’ means ‘global epidemic’,
so ‘global pandemic’ is tautological and means ‘global global epidemic’, which is obviously nonsense. One can’t expect any better of grandiloquent politicians but journalists should know better. Similarly, few seem to know what the
prefix ‘pre’ means, hence the tautological neologism ‘pre-order’. I even heard ‘pre-prepared’ recently. Also, many now use the words ‘Covid’
and ‘coronavirus’ interchangeably, when, in fact, Covid-19 is the illness caused by the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. There’s also widespread misuse of
‘trafficked’ and ‘traffickers’. People who are trafficked (mainly young women) come to the UK (or elsewhere) in the belief that they are coming to proper, legal jobs.
The people who come across the Channel in small boats and dinghies (mainly young or youngish men) know that they are coming illegally – that’s why they come that way. The people who arrange their transport are smugglers, not traffickers.
Oh, and the plural of ‘medium’ is ‘mediums’ only when it refers to people who pretend to speak to the dead. When it means TV, radio, newspapers and so on, the word is ‘media’. You’d think people in the media would know that. Sheila Miller London N4
Tech giants should pay tax – and for content The battle between Australia and Google/Facebook could offer a glimmer of hope for content producers. It seems to have taken a decade for governments to wake up to the monopoly power of the fintech giants; maybe they will start to regulate and tax these giants fairly. What has amazed me is the way Google has ‘scraped’ images and content with gay abandon. The most amusing aspect of being on Google Images is that they reproduce everyone’s work and add in small type ‘Images may be subject to copyright’. They and we know full well they are subject to copyright, but only now is anyone daring to ask them to pay for this. The big tragedy is that Google wasn’t set up as a not for profit trust, as Wikipedia was. It is good to see the EU and even Little Brexit England finally starting to work out how to make the fintech companies pay their way in terms of both taxes and journalistic content. David Siddall Cockermouth, Cumbria
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STEVE BELL
THE OWNERS
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