In keeping with my habit of noting pointless errata, just as one should on a blog, I will recount today’s experience.

As I approached the local supermarket, not twenty yards distant, I was accosted by a ruddy-faced chap. I caught his eye, and he sidled up to ask “Can you get me a plastic bag from the Supervalu?” I declined, baffled as usual. He wasn’t a child looking for some kindly adult to buy booze. He may have been mad, or disabled, but surely if he had the capacity to ask me for this favour, he had the ability to buy a bag. We will never know, and civilization is the lesser for it.

Today, hired by a makeup company to shoot a video, I attended a wedding fair in deepest Citywest. An exposition of chintzy, tasteless tat. There is something about weddings that attract the worst of whatever service you want. I know of film, wedding videos are what you do when all else has failed (almost there). It seems to be the same for every industry.

As the pastey trudged around, grabbing samples from envelope manufacturers, meaty paws flipping the brochures of countryside hotels, the giant vinyl barn in which this all took place rattled and quivered frighteningly. Buffeted by gale-force winds, it seemed, several times, to be on the verge of collapse, its steel ribs waving like the carcass of a long-dead whale, just a whisp of skin, all undulating in the currents at the bottom. The threat of imminent death did nothing to dissuade the ravenous, though. They continued to consume, glazed-eyes, the gooey, gaudy innerds.

It was all a potent metaphor for something. I’m going to go with either the Celtic Tiger or the credit crunch. Probably.

Perhaps you have heard of The Times being taken in by a fictional Moldovan teenage footballer, Masal Bugduv? It seems some Pádraig Ó Conaire fans have been hard at work for the last few months building up an online profile for the young prodigy, and succeeded in duping lazy journalists (also known as “journalists”) pretty much everywhere.  The teen was heavily linked with Arsenal, with visits by his agent to “Highbury House” (a real place, apparently). The jig was up shortly after he appeared on a list of the 50 most promising young footballers.

All worthy of a polite golf clap. My favourite bit was this comment from a despondent Gunners fan:

I reckon Arsenal should still try to buy him. Even a fictional Moldovan teenager would be better than Emmanuel Eboué.

This is a picture of a box of Cadbury Heroes (stolen from this blog with an almost comprehensive review).

This box is quite similar to two that I received recently (thanks, Mark and Fionnuala). Indulge me while I give you a quick run-down of the characters. How about clockwise from top left? You will soon warm to the theme.

Twirl
Pictured with a hula hoop to emphasise its rotational essence.

Dairy Milk
Wears a crown because it is the King of Chocolates, duh.

Whole Nut
Has a Mad Hatter’s Hat because it’s NUTS.

Caramel
Slinks a feather boa around itself to remind you of Miriam Margolyes’ sultry caramel bunny voice ad.

Dream
Has some angel wings because it’s floaty and white.

Crunchie
Might be on a spring? I can’t really see it and it’s not on my box.

Picnic
Toting a bindle full of sambos for some outdoor eatening!

Time Out
Reading Condé Nast Traveler, I think.

Fudge
Wearing glasses made popular by Elton John because… oh.

When I was studying linguistics in college I particularly loved the type of sociolinguistics pioneered by William Labov*, which (simplifying greatly) iinvolves analysing masses of speech recordings alongside the personal and social characteristics of the speakers to uncover the movement of sound change through a speech community. It’s a lovely subject, with analysis that combines the abstract and the highly personal and that reveals a lot about people and society along the way.

If there’s a problem, it’s that the raw data can be quite expensive and time-consuming to collect, because to do proper comparisons what you want to end up with is lots of people from a particular language community saying the same word in a reasonably natural fashion. I’ve wondered in the past whether the internet might somehow open a door to the kind of mass vocal harvesting that might help in this area, all of which is a long-winded introduction to a fab site called Forvo.

It’s a nifty little site that makes it very easy for you to add recordings of yourself pronouncing words in your native language, and since starting last year they’ve got 171,000 words in 204 languages. Here’s Dublin in English and German, sláinte in Irish, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Farsi and, hallelujah, Dirk Kuyt in Dutch. And if you are still unsure how to pronounce ‘fuck’ in a variety of world accents, there are many people here who would like to help you.

It’s probably unlikely that Forvo or something like it will ever replace proper sociolinguistic fieldwork (not least because the recordings aren’t ideally ‘natural’), but if it takes off it could be of some value to researchers as well as being loads of fun for everyone else. For that to happen I suppose it needs to carefully tread the fine line between access that’s open enough to prompt a lot of valuable usage and access that’s so open it gets spoiled by varieties of abuse or toolery.

* If I’ve got a pop science book in me it might be something about Labov along the lines of ‘Freakoguistics! How one man uncovered the secret behind the way you speak’ or something similarly over-excited. Think this but with considerably more padding. Seriously though, Labov’s a mensch - among other things, check out this story of how his evidence helped free an innocent man from jail.