I read in El Mundo last week that a chap had been sentenced to 600 years in jail for some dreadful offence. The article added that, in the first five years after his release, he won’t be allowed to go anywhere near Logroño. I assume it was Methuselah wot done it.

What, I wonder, are the odds that ‘Methuselah’ would be accepted by Word’s spellcheck facility, when numerous upstanding English words aren’t? ‘Spellcheck’, for example.

There is an enormous affection for acronyms in Spain. Or perhaps just a necessity. Spanish words are rich with syllables. And sentences replete with polysyllabic words. So I guess it is not surprising that organisations have titles that are less than catchy to the Anglo-Saxon ear. And, of course, when you have a central government and more than 20 ‘Autonomous Communities’ [itself a good example], there are a lot of official organisations with names that have to be abbreviated if one is ever going to be able to get through a newspaper article. So… in one short read today, I was confronted with PP, PNV, EA, BNG, PHN, EH, UPN, PSN and PSOE. And that’s just a few major political parties. When they all start forming coalitions and then negotiating with the unions [ICV, PSUC, CiU, etc.], it’s like reading alphabet soup. I don’t know how they get by with just Labour, Tories and the TUC back in Britain. Or the UK, perhaps. Acronomyic deprivation, I fear.

What, I wonder, are the odds on Word’s spellcheck facility not accepting ‘acronomyic’?

On the theme of the day, I leave you with ANECA – the Asociación Nacional de Evaluación de la Calidad y Acreditación. This is clearly an organisation crying out to be acronymised. What are the odds, I wonder, on Word's spellcheck facility not accepting the word ‘acronymised'?