Paul Annett

You may have heard of South by South West, the famous music festival held annually in Austin, Texas. Unless you’re in the industry, you’re less likely to have heard of the film and interactive festivals that are also part of the month-long event.

At Clearleft, we regularly close the office and all head over for the interactive week — in fact, Andy, Jeremy and Rich are regular speakers there. This year, James also rocked the house with a very popular presentation about the way we prototype websites before building the final version.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and propose a presentation for next year, called Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design). I say “propose” because they take votes on which panels should be included in the schedule.

So, I’m taking this opportunity to request your vote.

Please click here and rate my panel idea 5 stars. Thanks for your support, and sorry for the shameless self-promotion!

Just a quick note about something that really annoys me from time to time. Americans who say “I could care less” to mean they don’t care.

I should add that I’m not being in any way anti-American, it’s just that this particular grammatical error has developed only in American-English, and is not present in British-English. I’m not just talking about bad-English, this phrase in particular means exactly the opposite of its intended meaning.

Let’s assume that I don’t care about something at all. That would mean I care a zero amount about it. I could NOT care any less than zero about it. I couldn’t care less.

On the other hand, if I do care about something, then you could say that I care more than a zero amount about it. If I’m caring more than zero about it, I could care less.

To sum up, if you say “I could care less” then that means that you do care. If you mean to say that you don’t care, you need to say “I couldn’t care less”.

That concludes today’s English lesson!

Are there any nonsensical common phrases that you find annoying? Please click here and leave a comment.

richardr has a photo of Broadcasting House on Flickr. His photo is titled “White City”. That would be an easy mistake to make since they’re both BBC buildings, so I left a comment simply saying the photo seemed to be mis-titled White City, rather than Broadcasting House.

I thought I was being helpful. He replied by private message:

Your rudeness
Before you leave patronising comments on other accounts you might care to read the comments trail explaining why a particular title has been chosen.

I’m surprised that he’d consider my comment to be patronising, and slightly offended that he’d title his reply “Your rudeness” and block me on Flickr! Talk about over-reaction! I get comments like “DUNB CUNT GO SUK UR MOMS MILK NOOB” daily on YouTube (that particular gem was left for me yesterday) and I don’t respond at all.

I admit I didn’t read the 350-word essay he’d left in the photo comments, which now that I look explains in depth why the photo is titled as such. But I wouldn’t say it’s uncommon for people not to read huge swathes of text on a photo sharing website.

Oh well, at least he brought the smile of incredulity to my face. And the chance to trump his over-reaction by blogging about it. I dunno, some people!

Of course, I wouldn’t want to encourage you to leave a similar comment as if you’ve just stumbled upon it, explaining that he’s got the title wrong. That would be bad, and not funny at all of course. *snigger* (if you get there and there are no recent comments, that’s because he’s deleting each individually - I know at least three people have commented in the last hour!)

These photos of White City and Broadcasting House are by Stevec77 and Speedwaystar respectively. richardr’s photo isn’t licenced for me to republish here, unfortunately.