This month’s irritants

Are other readers of The Oldie troubled by seemingly simple things that they do not understand? What is meant by ‘There will be a thirty-minute delay on trains from Euston to Birmingham this morning’? Will trains be leaving thirty minutes late? Or will the journey take thirty minutes longer than usual? What does ‘today will be a milder day’ mean? Does it mean warmer if it’s winter and cooler if it’s summer? Why do forecasters talk about ‘showers followed by intermittent rain’?

BERNARD DIXON

One of my major irritants: newscasters on BBC Northwest, usually one male, one female, smiling shyly at each other (or looking serious, depending on the subject matter) while reading alternate sentences off the same autocue.

CHRISTOPHER DEACY

Am I alone in finding that the word ‘toilet’, when used in place of ‘lavatory’, jars the ear and assaults the eye? Lavatory as a sound has a pleasing robustness and is longestablished English usage. Toilet, in the sense of lavatory, is an interloper – an unwelcome and unnecessary over-refinement. Moreover, the charm of the word ‘toilet’, when used in its originial sense (as in ‘The young maiden at her toilet’), has been almost irretrievably lost.

ALEXANDER MCGEOCH

When watching television news programmes I notice what appears to be a proliferation of purple ties on the part of politicians, news readers and pundits. I wonder if it has been suggested by some psychoanalyst that the colour imparts a subliminal message to the viewer, in that the brain may be more susceptible to the receipt of information imparted?

GRAHAM BURTON