Today's grammar gripe ...

Those bloody signs that read "Road liable to flooding." I see them all over the country, and if you check the image below, you'll see that they have the same signs, with the same bad grammar, in the UK. That surprised me but there we are.

Anyway, what's wrong with this sentence fragment? Well, "road liable to flooding" is grammatically equivalent to saying, "If this rain persists, the road is likely to flooding." Even a child would tell you that that is terrible grammar. The road is likely to flood, certainly but to say that a road is likely to flooding makes no sense. "Likely to" and "liable to" have to be followed by an infinitive. There are no two ways about it.

So, what could the genius that phrased this sign (that we in Ireland no doubt blithely copied verbatim without proof-reading it) have put? Take your pick of:

Road liable to flood
Road likely to flood
Road prone to flooding
Road subject to flooding.
And indeed, many more.

You'd think something as important as the phrasing on road signs would be handled by a department of people that can actually use the language properly.

Just walk under a fucking bus, why don't you?

You know what, I had an epiphany this morning: I was walking to work and a teenage lad - a long streak of piss - came walking towards me engrossed in his phone; both thumbs going like billy-o. Long story short, he walked right into me, looked up and glared at me like it was my fault then strode on, still immersed in his phone. 

Now, this sort of thing used to drive me insane, and I bemoaned the dumbing down of the upcoming generation. But today - and this is the revelation I had - I realised the purpose of such wastrels: They're 21st century cannon-fodder. Every generation needs hordes of dumb assholes you can send into the machine-gun fire - either literally or figuratively - and preferably before they have a chance to breed.

All cynicism about the next generation aside, there are plenty of smart and driven kids who are not part of the Eyes Down tribe. The dumber these fucks get, the more easily the intelligentsia can exploit them. Given that, are we witnessing accelerated Darwinism?

I'd like to think so.