Hot Air & Cake Crumbs

It's one of those phrases you don't easily forget, "Hot air and cake crumbs". Delivered with exasperation well over a decade ago by a German friend and colleague of mine when we were both living in the south of France, working at IBM's telecommunications research laboratory, not far from Nice. Horst Garus took great pride in his studying of language and was particularly proud of his idiomatic use of English - however, this particular phrase came out of the blue - and yet Horst delivered it with such belief that I automatically integrated it into my own idioms as if I'd been using if for a lifetime. He explained later that it was a literal translation from German and he just assumed it would work - and I'm pretty sure that if we took a poll across our readership right now, we'd have close agreement regarding its meaning.

Why not post a comment telling us what you think it means?

Some of these literal translations work better than others. For example, I used to wonder why French parents referred to their children as "... my little cauliflowers...", until I remembered my own Mother coming up with "...chicken-lamb-kins..." (or however it's supposed to be written).

And the point of all this?

The point is this: communication's a funny thing, because every day we're presented with a dichotomy. On the one hand we are required to be very precise in our use of language in order to ensure the correct meaning is transmitted, while on the other, what appears as border line waffle gets the precise message across nicely.

Did I know what Horst meant when he labelled a fellow colleague's efforts as, "hot air and cake crumbs"? You betcha. And did I know who "chicken-lamb-kins" was? You betcha.

However, over the next couple of days and just for a bit of fun count the number of times you find the possessive apostrophe incorrectly applied - my pound to your penny that it'll outweigh the correct usages and I think that's pretty sad.

"Eats Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss should be compulsory reading for all.