Spectator wrote:

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Err... sorry to be obtuse, but could someone explain the connection between Mitchell Krueger and aviation?

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 Took me a while too. The ranking!

Spectator wrote:

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Err... sorry to be obtuse, but could someone explain the connection between Mitchell Krueger and aviation?

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As I am the one that start all this, I will give you a clue.

It is not Mitchell Krueger that is linked to aviaton, it is his ranking !!

Spectator wrote:

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One may hope that Mr Edmund will be emboldened by this victory to undertake new challenges and scale new heights. (Phrasing and boldface type a transparent excuse to say that "to put in boldface" is the phrasing I would use to get around the various controversies. Those are, of course, Con-TRAH-ver-sees, and not CON-troh-ver-sees).

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I really have stirred up a hornet's nest here, haven't I 

I would have been just as baffled if Bob hadn't bolded the ranking. But since he did, I just cringed instead  (as I so often do at myself LOL)

Stircrazy wrote:

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Spectator wrote:

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Err... sorry to be obtuse, but could someone explain the connection between Mitchell Krueger and aviation?

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It's nothing to do with Krueger himself, Spectator, but rather his ranking:  747, as in "jumbo jet"...   Bob was just being very silly!

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Nothing new there then !!

steven wrote:

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I would have been just as baffled if Bob hadn't bolded the ranking.

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I, like Spectator, am a words person by both inclination & professional training:  anything to do with numbers (& computers!) is guaranteed to make me run for cover or reach for a stiff drink, but, because of the bold, I got it straightaway.   Unlike Spectator, however, I'm not sure I'd've had the courage to confess my ignorance & ask what it meant even after spending time trying to work it out & still not getting it...

P.S.  "Bolded", Steven?  I've seen that in material we've been sent from "continental Europe" clearly written by someone who was not a native English-speaker & called him/her all the names under the sun, but ultimately dismissed it on the assumption that s/he was merely displaying his/her ignorance of the true English word "emboldened", which I would instinctively use.  Clearly my mother tongue has now been corrupted (largely by the American influence combined with the mind-boggling ignorance of most Brits of their native tongue such that they are unable to distinguish between the "English" they hear constantly in imported US television series & proper British English, so assume the two are interchangeable!  But then, on the evidence I see every day, they're no longer taught proper English at school. ) even more than I've believed for some time!  

SC - I have only ever used "emboldened" where the "bold" bit relates to "courage" or similar, I don't remember having seen it used in the sense of making text bold. However, looking it up in the OED, it appears that you are correct.

I thought when I wrote "bolded" that it didn't sound great, but when I thought for half a second about changing it to "made ... bold" or something like that, that didn't sound much better. Since it was only a quick, unimportant post that (like this one, with any luck! ) would soon get lost forever, I left it. Even having looked it up, I'd feel silly talking about "emboldened text" - for me, it conjures up visions of animated capital letters holding shields and swords and rushing into battle Trying it out on a couple of people who work with language in their job and who also generally dislike Americanisms, one (offline) screwed up her face and said re. emboldened text "that sounds weird" and the other (online) replied "that sounds a bit odd to me."

In most cases, US English grates on me almost as much as it does on you and on the other two people mentioned above, but I often use Americanisms when talking about IT (another example is "program" rather than "programme" for a computer program) when I'd never dream of using them in any other context. I think of computer-related terms as being technical terms almost with a language of their own, eg. I think of "program" and "programme" as two completely different things, in the same way as I think of "to bold" (text) and "to embolden" (encourage) as completely different things.

You could argue that making text bold pre-dates word processing packages, but for me it doesn't - my first typewriter (which I got given when I was 5 when my dad's old firm were switching to computers and the old typewriters were being sold off for next to nothing) could only do black, red or a (rather funky LOL) top half black / bottom half red combination. How bold or otherwise the text came out was pretty random, though that probably had a lot to do with my lack of typing skills.

Anyway, that is just a (probably fruitless) attempt to convince you that I am not mindlessly picking up everything I hear in imported US TV series (probably because I don't watch that many of them) and that I was taught proper British English at school by some excellent teachers who, admittedly, would probably be as shocked as you are at me using "to bold" as I just did! 

I sometimes feel we really ought to rename this the "British tennis, terrible puns and use of English discussion forum" - "Andrew Murray message board" is (to coin another awful American phrase) so 2005 ...

Back to Kyle, shall we ...