METEOROLOGICAL IRRITATIONS

I admit it - I'm a pedantic old curmudgeon, and I quite enjoy it at times. So, when radio or TV presenters give me an opportunity to growl and show my false teeth at them, I seize it eagerly. Weather forecasters are frequently and unwittingly at the wrong end of my grumpiness. They seem to have forgotten that temperature is a scale on which numbers are used to indicate the degree of heat and coldness in the atmosphere at a particular location. So temperature is either high, low, above or below (or well above or well below) or at the seasonal average - right? Not according to the current generation of weather-people.

They announce that the temperature will be mild, cold, warm, hot, perishing or any other adjective not associated with with the numbered scale, and I feel my pedantic hackles begin to rise. Why can't they just get things right? Or doesn't the licence-payer understand temperature any more? Sadly, scales are probably an alien concept among the great unwashed and soundbite-educated of the vac-packed and pot-noodled consumer generation.

There was a saying which went: "Red sky at night is the shepherd's delight; red sky in the morning is the SAILOR'S warning." This is constantly being misquoted over the airwaves these days. I heard this represented, for the second time this week, on Radio Scotland's Out of Doors programme, yesterday morning, as "shepherd's warning". Why on earth would the gales and rain portended by a red glow in the eastern sky around sunrise constitute a warning to a shepherd, whose flocks are little concerned by such conditions? The sheep merely seek the comparative shelter of walls and embankments during the worst of rainy windy weather.

I recall, while at primary school, being gently and firmly corrected by the teacher when I uttered this snippet of folklore incorrectly. I would like to see a buxom leather-clad schoolma'am take a keen tawse to some of the hapless media presenters, whose grammatical gaffes and cliche-peppered output are the main focus of my curmudgeonliness. Let's face it, this is one of the few pleasures left to people of my generation - and the light at the end of the tunnel is always on the level playing-field at the tip of the iceberg, isn't it?