Tuesday 18 August 2015

The Perils of Listening in English, Part 3

The Scottish Government recently announced that it would be banning the growing of GM crops, in an attempt to protect the excellent reputation that Scotland's food and drink industry has garnered over the years. Let's ignore any references to deep-fried Mars bars, eh?

So, I was alarmed to hear on our local radio the other day, that farmers in Orkney were having a terrible year due to something called 2-Wheat.

I could only assume that this was the trade name given to a fearsome and ecologically damaging genetically-modified cereal crop but, unsurprisingly, I was wrong.

Orkney has had a great deal of rain through the Spring and Summer: cattle couldn't be turned out onto pasture until much later than normal; hay-making was delayed, and many crops have had a shortened growing season.

An awful situation though this is, it isn't the cataclysmic destruction of our environment by some nightmarish science experiment. Nope, it is just that the ground's been too 'weet' i.e. wet.

Sigh.

2 comments:

biobabbler said...

Ah, that's a good one. Thank you for the belly laugh.

Just watched a bit of "The Hunt For Red October" with DH last night and the mixture of accents, floating above the former-Mr. Bond's impressive brogue is rather dizzying. =) And, therefore, delightful.

Imperfect and Tense said...

Sho, you live in Yoshemite?