Lockdown diary, day 12

We have followed the direction from Matt Hancock and stayed inside today, clearing up clutter and moving furniture.

As a veteran of many conference calls, I think I spotted something finally happen today at the Downing Street press conference which I had anticipated for what seems like weeks, though it's only about eleven days.

One of the journalists who had joined online was called to ask a question, his image appeared on a monitor and showed him apparently speaking but no sound came.

Michael Gove told him that they couldn't hear him, and he started again and this time he was immediately audible.

I'd bet any money that he had been trying to talk "on mute."

One of the first disciplines that anyone who is used to conference calls learn is to turn off the microphone when you are not actually trying to speak, especially if there is any ambient noise at your location (including the sound of yourself typing as you make notes of the meeting; my boss is one of many people who seem to be able to hear the sound of a computer keyboard no matter how bad the connection is.) This is called being "on mute."

Some conference call systems have a default setting that people are on mute when they join and have to actively switch mute off, or have to have it deactivated by a conference call organiser, before they can speak.

However, people sometimes either forget to turn off the mute function when it's their turn to speak or are asked a question, or it takes them a moment to bring up the right window, get the mouse pointer to the right icon and click on it. And then you get an embarrassing silence. 

Hence I'd been wondering how long it would take before someone manged to be on mute when they were called to speak at the daily Coronavirus press conferences. So we have our answer - eleven days.

Something else which happened today is that the Journalist, former Sunday Times editor and TV personality Andrew Neil made a twitter post which included the word "pleniloquence."

Now, without false modesty I'm fairly widely read and used to people with a big vocabulary, so it is not all that often that I come across a word I've never seen of heard before.

Realising that a the medium-size dictionary I keep in my office at home might not include that word, I get up and went into the room which houses the reference section of my personal library, and picked up the Oxford Reference Dictionary, which is a massive tome, the size of two bricks side by side, to look up "pleniloquence."

It didn't include the word.

So I did a search for the definition of the word on the internet.

Aha.

Indeed, having found the meaning I am quite surprised not to have ever had this word thrown at me.

Apparently it means incessant or excessive talking.

Must remember it for use at some point on one of the few people whose performance in the talking-the-hind-leg-off-a-donkey stakes is even greater than mine.

Keep well.

Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.