Status-Q

I thought this BBC post by William Kremer presented a pretty balanced view about dietary gluten. Here’s a quick summary for people like me who knew nothing about this:

• As a general rule, avoiding gluten is a bad idea because we get valuable vitamins and fibres from it that you would then have to supplement in some other way.
• A little under 1% of people, however, suffer from coeliac disease which gives them serious gluten intolerance, and the increasing availability of gluten-free foods is very valuable for them.
• There is a larger group of people who may have some gluten sensitivity, perhaps as high as 6%, and can benefit from reducing or avoiding it. This is hard to test for, and its existence is somewhat debated, but double-blinded trials with placebos suggest that it isn’t completely imaginary.
• Nearly 30% of Americans, however, feel that they ought to try and avoid gluten in their diet. This is a recent trend.
• If you replace gluten-containing foods – e.g. baked goods – with gluten-free alternatives, you will often be worse off because they tend to be more calorific. You can lose weight, however, by replacing them with fruit and vegetables.

There seem to have been a few reports of people being struck by lightning recently – this recent tragedy in the Brecon Beacons being one example.

So what should you do if you find yourself at risk? My first thought would be to get close to something taller and more conductive than me. But this site suggests it’s a bad idea – being close to a strike can be almost as dangerous as being hit. They also recommend sitting on your rucksack, to insulate you from the ground, which I guess is fine as long as there hasn’t been any rain recently.

On a cheerier note, I saw some reports last week about a man who had been struck twice in his life, and survived both. This was pretty unusual in itself, but the focus of many of the articles seemed to be his name: Rod.

Photo: Kent Porter. Thanks to Jo for the link to the mountain safety site.

Prof. Harold Thimbleby on how good design can dramatically improve safety.

Thanks to Simon for the link.

If you leave Cambridge and go south-west for about an hour and a half, you get to Heathrow airport. From there you can head westwards to a strange place where they speak a kind of English – quite a reasonable kind of English – but it’s a bit different, particularly in its spelling, from what most Englishmen would find familiar.

I’m referring, of course, to Oxford.

Now, I’m generally a big fan of the Oxford English Dictionary, but I was shocked – shocked, I tell you – to discover recently that they spell ‘organize’ with a ‘z’. And organization. And realize and realization. And so forth. I immediately assumed I was looking at a modern global edition which had sold out to the American market, but no, my elderly Shorter OED on the shelves at home has the same failing. It does offer the -ise variants as an option, but the primary spelling is with a ‘z’.

Now, I know that across the pond, those nice Americans have their own spellings, but surely no well-educated native Englishman in recent centuries would spell ‘organisation’ with a ‘z’. My father simply didn’t believe it until I showed him. Yet this is something on which the OED has apparently taken a line, to the extent that there’s a wikipedia page about Oxford Spelling for surprised people like me. The page admits:

Oxford spelling is not necessarily followed by the staff of the University of Oxford. In 2011, 2012 and 2013, the university website recommended the use of “ise” for its public-relations material.

The argument put forward in favour of Oxford spelling is that -ize corresponds more closely to the Greek -izo, which is the root of most -ize verbs. (Unlike, say the French/Latin origins of words like ‘surprise’.)

This may make academic sense, and indeed, many academic publishers have adopted it including, I’m embarrassed to say, Cambridge University Press. It seems to be favoured particularly for those publications with a more international audience. Even The Times used it for a while before reverting to the natural way of things.

So, lest anyone outside these shores be confused… yes, the OED is normally the gold standard for British English, and those Oxford chaps generally know what they’re talking about. I even agree with them about the comma. But this, surely, is a step too far in the direction of prescription over description.

The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed.
But they none of them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad!