Last modified on Tue 27 Apr 2021 11.17 EDT
Should we be worried for the English language when companies drop their vowels to appear more modern? No, say leading linguists, but a company rebranding is wrong because it is ill-judged, confusing and is definitely not the zeitgeist. It stnks.
Standard Life Aberdeen announced on Monday a name change to Abrdn, joining brands such as Flickr, Scribd, Grindr and Tumblr in dropping vowels from their names. The move was met with bafflement and scorn from linguists, who wondered if the name was now pronounced Aburden, Abradon or Aberdeen.
“To me it just smacks of old people trying to use youth language, or wanting to speak like teenagers, which is always a mistake,” said Rob Drummond, a reader in linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University and an expert in the language of young people. “It looks like older people desperately trying to sound cool.”
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Apr 25, 2021
Gill Hubbard, Professor of Health Services Research at the University of the Highlands and Islands, is the lead author of the paper. She explained: “Our findings show that people who had their own personal outdoor space, such as a garden or patio, had better mental health during the pandemic than people who had no outside space or who had to share their outdoor space at home. The study also shows that people living in affluent areas had better mental health than those in deprived areas. Taken together, this shows that the effects of this pandemic are worse for people who do not live in homes with accessible gardens.”
Leading scientists are calling on the Government to remove all coronavirus restrictions and allow people to ‘take back control of their own lives’ when the ‘roadmap’ to freedom ends in June.
With real-world data showing vaccines reduce the risk of death by 98 per cent and hospitalisations by more than 80 per cent, the experts say Covid-19 is being turned into a ‘mild’ disease in Britain, akin to the flu.
In an open letter to The Mail on Sunday, they criticise ‘confused and contradictory’ messages from Ministers and scientific advisers about the virus, which they say are exaggerating the real threat.
The signatories of the letter include Carl Heneghan - Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford
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