Graham Davies

Chris highlights one of Andy's key points that I missed: "Once sane and confident professionals..." - "once sane" being the key phrase. It's being going on a long time - since Ancient Greece: "Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad."

I like Andy's reflections on an OFSTED inspection. OFSTED is symptomatic of the check-box mentality of the DfES and the naive belief that everything can be measured according to a prescribed set of criteria. The same kind of mentality was becoming evident in HE at around the same time that OFSTED was set up - which is one of the reasons why I decided it was time (in 1993) to accept the early retirement package that was on offer. I am not sure that I could be classified as one the "creative, intelligent and thinking professionals" to whom Andy refers, but I would like to think so, and I could never have become an "obedient operative doing as I was told". Life is much better outside the teaching profession. As a free-lancer in a small business partnership, I can do more or less what I like, walk my dog whenever I like, take holidays when I like and stick two fingers up at the bureaucrats in the DfES.

If you are still puzzling over the languages at the ECML website, I have been contacted by CILT who confirm that I got them all right, with a few suggested additions/corrections: 10. Add Moldovan as well as Romanian 12. Add Bosnian as well as Croatian 35. Azerbajdjanian is known as Azeri 36. Irish My own comments on the above: 10. Moldovan is a variety of Romanian. Moldova was part of the Soviet Union and cut off from Romania (which borders it) until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 - and then the language reverted to its original Roman alphabet, having been written in Cyrillic under Soviet rule. When Moldova found its national identity again the language enjoyed a revival. 12. Bosnian is variety of Serbo-Croatian and has also found its identity now that Bosnia is recognised as a separate country rather than a federal state of what used to be Yugoslavia. Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian are mutually comprehensible. 35. Azeri is the correct term for the language. 36. Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic are very close. I evaluated an EC-funded email project in 1994 which involved linking schools in one of the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland (West Galway) with schools in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The children had few problems understanding written email exchanges - but it might have been different if they had been speaking to one another as spoken Gaelic has strong regional variations, even within the Gaeltacht in Ireland. Welsh (my father's language) - although part of the same Celtic group of languages - is a lot different from Gaelic, but some words are similar. While travelling in the Gaeltacht last year I could make sense of some place names. Re Moldovan and Bosnian, the difference between a language and a dialect is often determined by political considerations rather than linguistic considerations. Max Weinreich described a language thus: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" - or "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" in the original Yiddish ("Yivo and the problems of our time", Yivo-Bleter, 1945, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 13.) I speak and understand High German, but I cannot understand Swiss German or Bavarian/Tyrolean, both of which are described my many linguists as dialects of German, but they fulfil the criteria for being considered different languages from High German. "Eichhörnchen" (squirrel) in German is "Oachkatzel" in Bavarian/Tyrolean - "Oachkatzelschwoaf" ("squirrel's tail" and also the name of an alcoholic cocktail) being a shibboleth to test whether you can really speak Bavarian/Tyrolean. Scots (Lallans, not Gaelic) and Ulster Scots (Ullans) are classified as different languages from English. I've often been in situations in Scotland and Northern Ireland when I have completel failed to understand what was being said to me - but, having been married to a Belfast Girl for more than 30 years, my ear is now tuned into Ulster Scots and I understand perfectly expressions such as "he got a quare gunk" and "thon wee fellow fernenst me". See the European Minority Languages website: http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/saoghal/mion-chanain/en/

The feeling I get from recent conferences on the use of ICT, especially in my subject area, Modern Languages, is that VLEs such as WebCT and Blackboard are no longer regarded as the panacea. Web-based learning for learners of Modern Languages is fraught with problems. Learning a foreign language requires constant access to audio and video material, which is OK is you have a fast broadband connection, but it's mainly one-way traffic on the Web, e.g. it is not easy to set up a listen/respond/playback activity in a Web-based environment where the learner records his/her own voice and hears it played back - the kind of activity that has been possible with older technologies dating back to the 1960s and which is a feature of most multimedia CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs created for learners of Modern Languages. Recording and hearing one's own voice played back is essential in the early stages of language learning and useful at all advanced stages too, but I have yet to see a VLE that enables this to be done. One VLE that I had a look at a couple of years ago, which was developed specially for a network of schools, did not even allow audio playback in its Modern Languages section!

Regarding John's message, I have made several postings in the Modern Languages section, mostly with zero responses. I think the problem with the Education Forum is that is does not have an even spread of participants across the different subject areas, and it may fail to attract more people to the underrepresented subject areas if one topic from one subject area appears to be dominating the Forum. It's not that teachers in my subject area are inactive. I belong to another forum, the Linguanet Forum, which is aimed at language teachers, and it's a hive of activity most of the year round. A hot topic at the moment is the European Day of Languages, 26 September 2004. I have just posted a relevant message in the Modern Languages section. Replies welcomed! Maybe Modern Languages as a subject area is due to die out - especially now that the government has deemed it unnecessary to teach Modern Languages to children in England beyond the age of 14.

Dear Colleagues Just a reminder that it's the European Day of Languages on 26 September 2004. The ECML in Graz has several Web pages celebrating the event: http://www.ecml.at/edl/ Can anyone help identify the languages on the "Talk to me" stickers at: http://www.ecml.at/edl/default.asp?t=stickers My first shot - just an intelligent guess - follows. I am sure I have got a few wrong: 1. English, 2. French, 3. German , 4. Italian 5. Spanish, 6. Greek, 7. Latvian, 8. Dutch 9 Estonian, 10. Romanian, 11. Catalan, 12. Croatian 13. Macedonian, 14. Armenian, 15. Bulgarian, 16. Finnish 17. Czech, 18. Lithuanian, 19. Icelandic, 20. Albanian 21. Polish, 22. Maltese, 23. Slovenian, 24. Russian 25. Portuguese, 26. Norwegian, 27. Serbian, 28. Swedish 29. Slovakian, 30. Hungarian, 31. Georgian, 32. Turkish 33. Danish, 34. Ukranian, 35. Azerbajdjanian, 36. Gaelic 37. Letzeburgesch, 38. Rumansch, 39. Belorussian I picked up some nice multilingual stickers and postcards at the Linguanet Europa stand at EUROCALL 2004. These have been published by CILT/ALL for the European Day of Languages: http://www.cilt.org.uk/edl/

The EUROCALL 2004 conference in Vienna last week can be considered an unqualified success. Thanks to the organisational abilities of Klaus Peters and his support team, the conference ran very smoothly and delegates were treated to a vast choice of papers and show-and-tell sessions relating to the teaching of foreign languages (including English as a Foreign Language) with the aid of new technologies. Over 300 delegates from more than 30 countries attended the conference. The website will remain active for some time if you want to see what you missed: http://www.e-lisa.at/eurocall/ And, of course, Vienna is a beautiful city with stunning architecture and as much music as you could possibly wish for. I was delighted that, thanks to the England-Austria football match, I was unable to get a flight home on Sunday, 5 September, and had to stay on an extra day, which I was able to spend sightseeing and soaking up the atmosphere of this great European city. EUROCALL welcomes new members: http://www.eurocall-languages.org and there is a discussion list that both members and non-members can join at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html EUROCALL 2005 will take place in Krakow, Poland.

Mike writes: It's a fascinating debate for some, I guess, but not for me. I recall that the Mike's point has been raised before in another section of this Forum. Newcomers may find this domination of the Forum by one issue offputting. So, just to help redress the balance, I'm about to post something new in the MFL section.

Module 3.3 at the ICT4LT site focuses on setting up a website. ICT4LT is aimed mainly at language teachers, but Module 3.3 has been written in a more general way by Fred Riley, who is webmaster of a number of sites, including the ICT4LT site itself and the EUROCALL website. See http://www.ict4lt.org One has to consider not only the technological issues but, primarily, who the site is intended to serve and what it aims to do, e.g. are you setting up the site for advertising purposes, or are you using the site to store and distribute teaching/learning materials? Etc, etc... An interesting paper was presented by Lesley Shield (Open University) at last week's EUROCALL conference, considering the special needs of MFL as a subject area, e.g. MFL websites need special consideration regarding the delivery of sound (essential) and video (desirable). And so far I have not yet seen an MFL site that is able to offer listen/respond/playback activities (essential), which are a feature of most multimedia CD-ROMs for language learners. Other important considerations are: (1) Colour - e.g. never place red text on a green background (or vice versa) as red/green is the commonest form of colour blindness. Blue/orange and maroon/yellow are also "illegal combinations". Don't combine the primary colours either, e.g. red/yellow, as they tend to "bleed". and some people see them flickering. (2) Pay attention to SENDA (2001). (3) Respect copyright - if you put something up on a website you are publishing it and it must be your own material or permission to publish must be sought if it is not your own material. Copyright is a can of worms. I keep coming across copyright oddities, e.g. if you take a photograph of the Eiffel Tower in daylight you are free to publish it anywhere, but if you take a photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night you have to seek permission to publish it from the Eiffel Tower company. This has something to do with copyright on the lighting configuration. See: http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/pratique/faq/index.html Q. Is the publishing of a photo of the Eiffel Tower permitted? A : There are no restrictions on publishing a picture of the Tower by day. Photos taken at night when the lights are aglow are subjected to copyright laws, and fees for the right to publish must be paid to the SNTE. Two more caveats: 1. Don't publish pictures of children on the Web. 2. Be wary about publishing email addresses on the Web - my business email address has just been hijacked by spammers and totally wrecked. Use a contact form.

Andrew writes: This sums it up perfectly. The starting point for UKEU was the VLE environment - a classic mistake.

Apart from being a member of the Education Forum, I belong to two email lists, both of which are concerned with MFL teaching and learning: EUROCALL: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html Linguanet: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum You can find information about joining the lists on the above pages. You might also look at the extensive section on email of the ICT4LT site, Module 1.5, Section 14: http://www.ict4lt.org Although the ICT4LT site is aimed at language teachers you will find a good deal of general information here, including a few caveats on using chat rooms on the Web, netiquette, etc. Section 12 of Module 1.5 refers to discussion lists.

Not entirely true... ...at least when my wife did an OU degree in the 1970s and 1980s. It took her 9 years, starting as a student who had never taken a public examination in her life. What made the OU work for my wife was: 1. The high quality of the teaching materials: printed, radio, audiocassettes, TV broadcasts. 2. The excellent network of tutors who made regular contact with their students, mainly by telephone - one tutor being responsible for pastoral care and one being responsible for the module(s) being studied at the time. 3. Regular meetings with tutors and other students at the local tech college. 4. An annual one-week residential summer school at a UK university. I don't thionk things have changed all that much since the 1980s. The OU is researching online tuition with systems such as their own Lyceum package (the OU was well represented at last week's EUROCALL conference in Vienna), but the OU hesitates to make a new technology an integral element of a course until a substantial majority of students have access to it, e.g. videocassettes were not available when my wife was an OU student because VCRs were beyond the budget of most households at the time. It's a political thing, of course - no one should be excluded from access because of their lack of access to or experience with a new technology. BTW, the UK E-University (UKEU) collapsed spectacularly in June this year...

I've just had a look at the list of participants attending the EUROCALL 2004 conference on the use of ICT in language learning and teaching in Vienna next week: http://www.e-lisa.at/eurocall/ It paints an interesting picture of the interest in ICT and teaching and learning foreign languages in Europe and in the world as a whole. The ten countries sending the largest groups of delegates, in rank order, follow: 1. UK 2. Japan 3. Germany 4. Ireland 5. Austria 6. Finland 7. USA 8. Spain 9. Canada 10. Denmark Finland is sending 7 times as many delegates as France!

I wrote earlier about Moodle. It appears that Moodle is definitely catching on in certain communities, especially the computer assisted language learning (CALL) community - because Moodle supports a wide range of support languages. A workshop on Moodle is taking place next week in the EUROCALL 2004 pre-conference workshops at the University of Vienna. EUROCALL, by the way, is the oldest established (1986) professional association dedicated to the promotion of the use of ICT in language learning: http://www.eurocall-languages.org Here's what the EUROCALL 2004 conference programme says about Moodle: The aim of this workshop is to present Moodle, an open-source Course Management System (Virtual Learning Environment). During the first part of the event participants will first have a chance to experience a Moodle course from a student's perspective. During the second part they will create short course units on their own, as course designers. Moodle is a Course Management System which strongly supports social constructionist pedagogy. It is extremely feature-rich, providing instructors with an array of tools, such as: Resource – allows the presentation of electronic content (html pages, Word or Powerpoint documents, Flash animations, media files, etc), Forum – can be used for asynchronous discussions; some features of forums include different forum types (teacher-only, course news, open-to-all, and one-thread-per-user), different views, forward of new messages to e-mail, grading students' messages, Assignment – allows the submission of students' homework, Chat – for synchronous discussions, Journal – for individual, open-question tasks, Quiz – for automatically-graded quizzes; question types include multiple-choice, true-false, matching, short-answer, cloze; quizzes can also have such features as random questions, shuffled questions and answers, multiple attempts, cumulative attempts, Choice – for opinion polls, Survey – built-in surveys for analysing online classes, Workshop – allows peer assessement of documents, and the teacher can manage and grade the assessment, Glossary – allows teachers and students to create course glossaries and dictionaries, glossary entries can be automatically hyperlinked to words in resources and forums, Gradebook – all grades for Forums, Journals, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page; The main advantages of Moodle over other Course Management Systems include: its price – it is free, the structure of courses created with Moodle is much more topic-oriented (rather than tool-oriented) than in other systems, which makes it particularly useful for language teaching, Moodle users can get excellent support from lively community forums http://www.e-lisa.at/eurocall/programme.asp

I have visited the USA and Canada (where I have relations) on many occasions, and I have grown to love both countries. Occasionally I have made the mistake of getting into political debates with friends and family over there, expressing what in the UK would be regarded as a moderately liberal point of view, only to be accused of being a Communist. I tend to be a bit more cautious now - purely for the sake of keeping the peace. Another thing I have noticed in North America (less so perhaps in Canada) is a lack of appreciation of irony. I have been taken literally so many times in the USA that I sometimes feel I ought to wave a flag bearing the words "Irony Coming Up" when I am about to make an ironical remark. The rough-and-tumble, but good-humoured and often ironic, debating style that we are used to in the UK and Ireland does not appear to exist in the USA. Americans must find the confrontational (and entertaining) debates in the House of Commons really strange, and I doubt that many would survive long in the heated political debates we have in our local pub, where we yell at one another for five minutes and then buy each other a drink. My first impression on visiting the USA, around 20 years ago, was its insularity. TV news broadcasts and newspapers rarely mention events outside the USA. Perhaps it is due to this lack of awareness of what is going on in the rest that contributes to attitudes on the other side of the Big Pond. I only realised I was a European when I visited the USA for the first time. I have a collection of articles, "Notes from a big country", by Bill Bryson on my bookshelf, one of which is entitled "Those boring foreigners". Bill Bryson (who is an American by birth) writes: "Julian Barnes, in a line I intend to make my own when the moment is right, once observed that any foreigner visiting the US can perform an easy magic trick: 'Buy a newspaper and see your own country disappear'. Actually, you don't need to read a newspaper. You can read a magazine or watch TV or just talk to people. [...] Because there is so little exposure to non-American things, people here often get quite severely out of patience with anything that is not immediately recognizable to them."

As a modern linguist, I take a non-specialist interest in minority (and often dying) languages. Here's a site dedicated to nurturing and teaching indigenous Native North American Languages: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/%7Ejar/TIL.html I have a friend at the University of Arizona who has been involved in recording the last remaining speakers of selected North American indigenous languages and producing CD-ROMs for subsequent generations that wish to keep their languages and cultures alive. Has anyone seen the film "Windtalkers", the story about the Navajo radio operators in the Second World War?

I began my career as a teacher of German and French in secondary education in the 1960s, moving into higher education in 1971. I have been involved in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) since 1976. In 1982 I wrote one of the first introductory books on computers in language learning and teaching, which was followed by numerous other printed and software publications right up to the present day. My work in CALL was recognised in 1989 by the Academic Board of Ealing College of Higher Education (later to become part of Thames Valley University) when I was conferred with the title of Professor of CALL – the first chair in this subject area in the UK. I retired from full-time university teaching in 1993 but I continued to work as a Visiting Professor for Thames Valley University until 2001. I was the Founder President of EUROCALL, holding the post from 1993 to 2000. I am a partner in Camsoft, a CALL software development and consultancy business, which was founded in 1982. I have lectured and run ICT training courses for language teachers in 22 different countries and I sit on a number of national and international advisory boards and committees. I have been actively involved in WorldCALL since 1998 and I currently head a working party that is in the process of setting up WorldCALL as an official organisation that aims to assist countries that are currently underserved in the area of ICT and the teaching and learning of modern foreign languages. I am fluent in German, I speak tolerable French, and I can survive in Italian, Russian and Hungarian: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/cvgd.htm

Marco writes: Yes, I do that too - which has worried me a bit as a business owner that trades via the Web. But, having looked at the emails that our business has received over the last year, most of them have not turned into sales. Serious customers phone or fax us, and many customers still know how to write a letter, put it in a stamped and properly addressed envelope and post it :-)) Marco writes: We did that, but the flood of bounced emails became so enormous that it locked up our mail box every day and we we forced to suspend our email address. I may activate it again in a few months just to see what happens. We have a backup address, however, which is currently active and more secure. Ours was not the usual problem, i.e. the normal daily dose of ads for dirty websites, ads for medication, offers from Nigerian money launderers, etc. We could cope with that by using a good filtering program, MailWasher Pro. Our problem was that our address was being spoofed by dozens of spammers as their reply address, so that every day we were receiving hundreds of bounced emails from dead addresses and lots of irate emails of the "how dare you spam me" variety from people who received the rubbish that the spammers sent them. All the spammers had to do was copy our prominently displayed business email address from our website - and, no, it wasn't preceded by "mailto" and it wasn't clickable. Moral: Don't display your email address at your website! Use a contact form. Apart from the flood of spam, most email enquiries we receive are frivolous, and a very high percentage seem to come from people who are illiterate. Now that I have munged our email address into a contact form so that it is not so readily visible, the spam has stopped and now mainly serious people are writing to us by email. Peace at last! (For a while, anyway.)

Derek asks: A very good question! Teaching a language face-to-face requires high-level training. Teaching a language online requires highly specialised training. Personally, I would not employ anyone who had did not have a degree-level qualification in the relevant language, plus a teaching qualification (e.g. PGCE), plus some kind of qualification in online education and training - v. the courses offered at the Institute of Education, London University: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/english/OET.htm An excellent introduction to language learning online is: Felix U. (ed.) (2003) Language learning online: towards best practice, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. ISBN 90 265 1948 6. See also: Felix U. (2001) Beyond Babel: language learning online, Melbourne: Language Australia. Book plus CD-ROM, ISBN 1 876768 25 8. Language learning online features prominently in papers presented at the regular EUROCALL, IALLT and CALICO conferences: http://www.eurocall-languages.org (Europe) http://www.calico.org (USA) http://www.iallt.org (USA) - combines with the Japan Association for Language Education and Technology (LET) for FLEAT 5 in 2005: http://ce.byu.edu/cw/fleat5/

Derek writes: The cops probably know all about it. I have a friend in the police, a Detective Chief Inspector, who specialises in this kind of thing. They have lots of really unpleasant and serious crimes to deal with as well as scams of this sort. If you fall for such a scam, well... When the infamous "419" letters from Nigeria began to appear a few years ago you may remember that we were advised to report them to the National Criminail Intelligence Service: http://www.ncis.co.uk but 419 letters are now so common that you are advised only to notify the NCIS if they appear to be linked to extraordinary activities such as terrorism. But see the article "Turning the tables on Nigeria's email conmen": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3887493.stm I used to receive dozens of scam emails every week, purporting to come from Barclays Bank, the Halifax, eBay, the Woolwich etc, requesting me to visit a website and reveal my account details. They've stopped for the moment as I've now changed my email address - I had to as it was hijacked by spammers. But let's see how long it takes for them to track down my new address...

I used to suffer from regular junk telephone calls (mostly in the evenings) and from junk faxes, but virtually all of these have ceased since I registered with the DMA Preference Services: http://www.dma.org.uk/shared/PrefServices.asp A good deal of junk snail mail has dried up too as a result of registering with the Preference Services, but they don't seem to have the clout to stop junk emails. I used to amuse myself getting rid of junk telephone callers in my own way: Caller: Is that Mr Davies? Me: Yes, speaking. Caller: I represent X financial services. I wonder if it would be possible to discuss a new investment scheme that we are offering to selected customers. Me: (Having recognised that "financial services" really means life insurance.) OK, suggest a date. Caller: How about next Tuesday? Me: I'm afraid not, I go the the sub-aqua club every Tuesday. Caller: Would Wednesday be OK? Me: No, that's when our pot-holing club meets. Caller: Would you be free at the weekend? Me: Sorry, I'm learning to free-fall parachute jump over the weekend. Caller: What about the following Monday? Me: No, that's not convenient either. I have a hospital appointment - nothing special, just a check-up regarding a heart murmur. Caller: Thank you, Mr Davies, we'll be in touch some other time. If only we could get rid of junk emailers in the same way. It might just work. See the story entitled "Turning the tables on Nigeria's e-mail conmen" at the BBC site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3887493.stm

Andy writes: You won't necessarily lose email contact with your tutees, but you will in future have to be very careful about publicising your address. It's will be like having an unlisted telephone number - you give it out only to those who need to know it. You will also have to make your students aware of the necessity of Internet security and request them to install up-to-date anti-virus software and a firewall on their own computers. Two colleagues of mine had their computers trashed by viruses sent to them by their online tutees - which was mainly my colleagues' fault for not making their own computers secure. We used to display several different email addresses at our business website - one for each of the partners. We all received spam. Some of it was clearly tailored to the sex of the partners, so I (as a male) got most of the ads for Viagra, and the females got most of the ads for make-up, clothing etc. But a lot of the spam was completely indiscriminate - and often disgustingly graphic. The spam got worse, so first I removed the "mailto" tags of the addresses. The spam continued to get worse, so I blocked all the personal addresses leaving one common contact address visible. The spam continued to get worse - no problem we just filtered it with MailWasher Pro. I even experimented by publicising a temporary email address without a "mailto" tag to see how long it took for the spammers' robots to find it - less than 24 hours! Then the spammers hijacked our address, using it as their return address. This caused our mailbox to overflow daily and lock up. So I killed the address and set up a new one. Now our contact address is munged into an offsite contact form. If you search our website for an email address you won't find it. Genuine enquirers can still email us via the contact form, but there is no indication where their email is heading and I don't have to reply to them if I suspect their motives in contacting us. In the business world this is the way things are going, I'm afraid, as our government has not tackled the problem with effective anti-spam legislation. Many small businesses have contacted me to indicate they they have suffered in exactly the same way as we have and have had to take similar evasive action. The education world will probably have to go down the same route. I wonder how long it will take for the spammers to break through the lines of defence I have set up. We'll see... See "The Death of Email" by John Dvorak (24 May 2004) at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1599324,00.asp See also "Email is broken" by the same author (19 July 2004) at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1624935,00.asp

John asks: No, IE6 is working fine. I've never had any problems accessing the Forum with IE6. Regarding the irritating pop-ups and spyware that Derek mentions, I kill pop-ups and cookies via my firewall, ZoneAlarm Pro - although I have to activate them when visiting certain known sites from which I buy goods and services. I keep a daily watch on adware and spyware with SpyBot and zap any new nasties that appeaar. In another part of this Forum I mentioned that my business recently had to take the unprecedented step of shutting down our former business email address. This is because the email address was hijacked by purveyors of spam and rendered totally useless within one week. We have suffered from the effects of viruses and spam for several years but, thanks to the efficient mail filtering system that we use (MailWasher Pro), these intrusions have been no more than an annoyance. On 15 July, however, we suddenly began to receive hundreds of bounced "undeliverable mail" messages per day. It is now evident that our email address was being spoofed as the sender's address by a number of different spam companies and we were the recipients of their bounced emails and irate replies from recipients of their rubbish. Our business no longer displays its email address at our website. Enquirers have to use a contact form offsite. Lesson to be learned: Don't display your email address prominently at your website and never display anyone else's email address unless they ask you to. See the WillMaster website on different ways of hiding or disguising (munging) your email address to avoid it being harvested by spammers - and see how vulnerable you are: http://willmaster.com/possibilities/archiv...020625001.shtml

As a linguist (German and French) I am amused by what goes wrong when advertisements are translated or when advertising slogans in English are coined by non-native speakers. I have a large collection of such "bloopers" gleaned from various sources on the Web. Here's a small sample: In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan Come alive with the Pepsi Generation came out in Chinese as Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the grave. When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you. However, the company mistakenly thought the Spanish word embarazar meant embarrass. Instead the ads said: It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant. Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan sounds much more interesting in Spanish. It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken got terribly mangled in Spanish translation. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that explained: It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused or It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate. Coors put its slogan, Turn it loose, into Spanish, where it was read as Suffer from diarrhoea. Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: Nothing sucks like an Electrolux. When Braniff translated a slogan touting its upholstery, Fly in leather, it came out in Spanish as Fly naked. The Microsoft ad slogan, as translated into Japanese: If you don't know where you want to go, we'll make sure you get taken. (No wonder Macs are the best selling computer in Japan.) Clairol introduced the Mist Stick, a curling iron, into German only to find out that Mist is slang for (to put it delicately) manure. Not too many people had use for the Manure Stick. This is the reason why Rolls Royce decided not to call one of its models the Silver Mist - for fear of lost sales in the German-speaking world. When Chevrolet developed the Chevy Nova, they decided to market it heavily in Mexico, where the name translates as doesn't go. The car was later renamed Caribe. Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for tiny male genitals. Ford pried all the nameplates off and substituted Corcel, which means horse. The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, Salem - Feeling Free, was translated into the Japanese market as When smoking Salem, you will feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty. The German advertising office of Wang computers came up with the unfortunate slogan Wang cares. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine. The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as something that when pronounced sounded like Coca-Cola: Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the characters used meant bite the wax tadpole or female horse stuffed with wax, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, Ko-kou-ko-le, which can be loosely translated as happiness in the mouth. Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan finger-lickin' good came out as eat your fingers off. An American tee-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market, promoting the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired I saw the Pope (el Papa) the shirts proclaimed in Spanish I saw the Potato (la Papa). Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in French Canada as Gros Jos before finding out that the phrase, in slang, means big breasts. In this case, however, the name problem did not have a noticeable effect on sales. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine. In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water. Japan's second-largest tourist agency was mystified when it entered English-speaking markets and began receiving requests for unusual sex tours. Upon finding out why, the owners of Kinki Nippon Tourist Company changed its name.

Derek writes: Essentially, the term "politically correct" has been hijacked. The once noble ideas associated with the term have been lost and the term has become the subject of mockery or exploitation for other purposes. This is why we need a new term.