B42

From BNC file HCV:  _IBOA [Irish Bank Officials Association] Newssheet_, 
u.p., n.d.


Although BNC is supposed to be derived exclusively from UK material, this
text contains a number of slight stylistic oddities which are probably
related to the fact that it originated in the Irish Republic.  (IBOA
covers both parts of Ireland, but internal evidence suggests that
the writing here came from south of the border.)  In this
connexion we made enquiries via an appropriate electronic discussion list
to try to discover whether Eire had developed distinctive norms
of written usage since independence from Britain.  The answer seemed to be
that so far as formal usage guides or schoolteaching practice was 
concerned, nothing had been developed separately from what is available
in Britain.  But that clearly does not mean that informal, tacit differences
might not have grown up.

Consequently it is possible that even some of the points described below
as downright unacceptable in good style might possibly rank as normal and
acceptable in the Irish Republic.  However, almost all of these, which
relate to redundant commas, occur in one particular item in a BNC
file extract which comprises parts of different items from a single
periodical.  Therefore it is much more likely that these points reflect
unskilled usage by an individual writer than distinctive national
orthographic habits.


Note that the end of extract B42 is not a paragraph division in the
original text.  The LUCY annotation closes the O tagma there in order to
ensure a balanced bracketing, but, exceptionally, in order to get
an extract of reasonable length the endpoint was placed inside a long
original paragraph.


00110  "twenty five":  it is unusual to write such figures as separate words
without hyphen, but even in Britain this might possibly occur as an
infrequent but intended style.

00110  "all other policyholder" -> "all other policyholders"

00129  "the spouses car" -> "the spouse's car"

00136  "Newsheet" looks like a spelling mistake; however, a Web search
suggests that there are many periodicals which do use this spelling, so
perhaps although mistaken at one time it should now be counted as a valid
alternative spelling.

00136  "National closet":  this is one example (cf. "in this Country", next
s-unit, or "Managers", "Schemes", in s-unit 00200) where 
this text seems rather old-fashioned in capitalizing concepts
which would be written with lower-case in modern Britain, though in 
previous eras they might have been capitalized here also (the reference
here is to a particular nation, Eire, but the word is not being used as
part of a proper name).

00138  The use of commas in this sentence would count as very unskilled in
Britain or America.  The word "historically" should not be followed by
a comma unless it were also preceded by one; and the commas after 
"pretended" and "country" should not occur at all.  But this is the kind
of clumsiness that many British writers would commit; it does not count
as a "misprint", so it has been left to stand.

00141  Again, the comma after "admit" should not appear.

00142  Likewise the comma after "disclosures".

00145  The comma after "abuse" might just be tolerable in good style, if there
was an intention for the following phrase to be understood as an 
afterthought.  But almost certainly in the context of this piece it is an
unskilled error.

00150-51  The term twice written here as two words, "border line", is normally
written solid; but such matters are not clearcut enough to justify correcting
the original text.

00154  Again the comma after "arises" is almost certainly redundant (cf. the
case in s-unit 00145).

00158  The comma after "past" would be quite impossible in good style.
The one after "important" is comparable to those discussed under s-units
00145 and 00154.

00161  The comma before "as their right" should not occur.

00188  Here, the comma after "seriously" should not occur where it does,
though after "confidentially" it would be perfectly acceptable.

00205  COD has an acute accent on "canaps", but many publications either
side of the Irish Sea omit Continental accents.
