Thursday, 6 May 2010

Continuing my occasional series...

As a follow up to this post, from today's Independent: Ukip's Nigel Farage injured in light plane crash*

Spotted by The Big Yin.

* Was it a light plane that crashed or a heavy plane that crashed lightly?

11 comments:

AntiCitizenOne said...

As they say on BSG "Good hunting!".

Chuckles said...

I offer the old pilots' advice - If you can walk away, it was a good landing. if you can use the plane again, it was an excellent landing.

Sue said...

Can't keep a good man down. I hope he recovers quickly.

DBC Reed said...

As someone who ,against all advice, tried to teach punctuation to teenage black youths (the leading troublemaker saved my skin by taking an obsessive interest in colons and semi-colons -true story),I would say that this shows the decline of the hyphen in standard usage.Correctly hyphenated, this headline would make sense.
BTW Don't forget to watch them fill in your details on the numbered stub of your voting slip ,on the ,doubtless, numerous occasions you visit the polling-station. (Without the hyphen this would mean that the place was polling e.g. smoking jacket (it's on fire); smoking-jacket (type of ).
If you're going to make a fuss,make sure you've got a camera crew in tow.And wear your LVT T-shirt!See you on the telly!

James Higham said...

Mr Farage was in the skies towing a banner with the slogan "Vote for your country - Vote Ukip".

Hey, that's one way to do it.

G4ry said...

The report starts with 1 passenger in a byplane & ends with 2 passengers in a whatever you call a plane with just the two wings, nothing like getting your facts right.

Outstanding reporter there.

DBC Reed said...

@G4ry
I think you'll find that's biplane.
Enjoying re-discovering my inner pedant or born-again pedantry,to get in another hyphen .( I know there is no bar on ending a sentence [ or phrase since there is no finite verb in the foregoing]with a preposition but I can't just bring myself to do it.

Ross said...

It wasn't a biplane, it was a heteroplane that was experimenting.

DBC Reed said...

Perhaps we should n't joke about this 'plane crash.Local Northants telly shows it lost its engine on hitting the ground and flipped over.There were rather grisly shots of Farage being pulled out of the wreckage: nice suit but face bloodied .Then there were reports from Banbury hospital that he was slipping in and out of consciousness and suffering from chest injuries.The pilot had to be cut out and was in a worse state. Not good.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, indeed, from the looks of the pictures it was a very nasty crash involving a light 'plane.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if Nige thought the plane was light.