January 8, 2008
Following the (hopefully) one-off re-emergence of ground-breaking rock combo Led Zepellin, Disciple Bob, had been regaling Yours Truly with the admittedly out-of-date news that David Coverdale, the lead singer of 1970s heavy rock band Whitesnake, had been getting in a bit of trouble with the bears in his mountain retreat in the US.
It turns out the local ursine inhabitants have taken to his abode in a big way, and have been using the pool and popping into the kitchen for the odd canape.
Naturally, this reminded Guru of an old flame from way out west called Ursula, even though she was not very hairy.
While pondering her fate (she disappeared one night never to be seen again), and wondering if the 'curse of the Urse' had caught up with her and she'd been dragged off kicking and screaming to be beheaded by the Huns (the less glamorous reality being that she'd had enough of blue-headed snoring), Yours Truly was jolted back to reality by the loud thud of a mountainous press release nearly breaking his desk in two.
It turned out to be a treatise on the benefits of good grammar, and by miraculous coincidence was from hairy-arsed Seventies rockers Whitesnake.
Reading through the amazing statistics – apparently, 60% of all business correspondence gets sent out without having gone through a spellchecker, according to the hairy band leader - Guru reflected that it seemed a curious change of direction for a former heavy metal god.
Then he took another look at the cover letter (as opposed to the Coverdale letter) and it turned out he'd miss-read the note.
It wasn't from David 'Ain't no bears in the heart of the city' Coverdale and chums, but from US pedants... sorry... grammar ‘specialisationalists’ WhiteSmoke.
Casting aside the murderous feelings brought on by the use of unnecessarily JoinedUp words with too many capitals, Guru decided to take a deeper look at the mountain of information.
WhiteSmoke claims that not enough people use a grammar or spell checking software – the very same kind of software that, by an incredible coincidence, it just happens to supply – before sending out documents, and berates the business community for its slovenly ways.
Heeding this warning, and running a spelling and grammar check – supplied courtesy of Microsoft Word – it seems the WhiteSmoke info pack is not without errors.
In fact, apart from being thoroughly American – which is in itself cause for deep-seated unrest in the soul – it was about 60% error-packed.
This was a disappointment as Guru was planning to go into a big misspelt tirade against poor spilling, takin to task those who miss out werds an genrally mayke a muss if there grammer wen righting bizniz dokumence.
