Poshitty (needless)

We spent most of our day today in Cambridge, where, among other things, we had drinks in a popular al fresco eating place of some intellectual historical significance. A booklet distributed by the management provides a long list of famous (or at one point famous-to-be) visitors taking their cream tea underneath the humble apple and pear trees there while talking iambic pentameter and the double helix. Rupert Brooke, apparently, yearned for The Orchard during an unhappy spell in boring Berlin (on not so boring Berlin, see here).

And I agree: it is indeed rather nice there.

Now of all cream tea joints in the world it was here that I had to discover the greatest linguistic inanity of this trip yet.

On a laminated note (oh, lamination, that other English vice) pinned to a wall by the food counter, I was forced to read the following syntactic aggregate of disturbing ambiguity:

Deckchairs - please ensure that your deckchair is securely erected before being seated.

Am I the only one who finds the sound of this polite reminder - apart from irritatingly contorted - a trifle naughty?

Broken English

On our daily treck into the big city we have the great pleasure to use the services of Southern Trains. An ... interesting experience, anthropologically. All those people to watch, all those conversations to overhear! One of the things that really bugs me, though, is the announcement made whenever the train comes to a halt in one of the half dozen stations between here and London Bridge: "Do not leave unattended luggage on the platform."

Now, if you ask me, this announcement entails a logical impossibility. “Unattended luggage” is not something that you can still leave on a platform - it has already been left there. That's why it's unattended. The phrase also suggests that this is somebody else's luggage, really, not something that you yourself could feasibly leave behind. In fact the request - formulated in this way - invites you to take any unattended items of luggage with you should you happen to come across them. To help Southern Trains.

To make sense, the announcement would have to run: “Do not leave luggage unattended on the platform.” Though that, too, sounds a bit tautological to me. Any act of creating a physical distance between you and your suitcase creates the state of unattendance so feared by the London transport authorities. There really is no need to adorn the act of "leaving" with an explanatory adverb, at least not with one of the pseudo-posh (but potentially misleading) type favoured by public companies trying to smarten up linguistically. Such as "due to" and "beverages."

Why not just: "Do not leave your luggage behind"?

Oh well, I guess this provincial bumpkin is being too simple-minded once again.