Best Of

The BBC has commissioned a legal drama set in the "glossy, high-octane world of Glasgow lawyers".

Counsels will follow "five young lawyers who once trained together at one of Scotland’s elite law schools, but are now scattered across the profession and find themselves facing each other in the courts of Glasgow".

"Some will rise to the top, while others risk losing everything as their careers teeter on the edge when they lock horns in their biggest cases yet," the Beeb said in a press release.

Counsels' "ambitious lawyers must navigate a legal battlefield where their friendships begin to fracture, love affairs crumble, and the fight for justice threatens to tear them all apart."

Sadly, it means the vital work of transactional lawyers in non-contentious roles, poring over documents for hours on end, will continue to go ignored by the telly people.

https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/bbc-capture-glossy-high-octane-world-glasgow-lawyers

This whole tv legal drama thing is getting stale. What I'd like to see for a change (and I think I speak for many) is something focused on an Accountancy practice. There's plenty of thrills and spills there, I can assure you. So let's get a top writing team on that. It can still be set in Glasgow if that's deemed important.

It's notable (to me anyway) that about 15 years ago cop procedurals had obviously gotten stale since most new shows were about various 'consultants' solving crimes as we'd clearly gotten bored of cops doing so. Legal dramas I don't think are so ubiquitous so may have lasted longer.

British TV shows are usually pretty bad anyway so in fairness it may be different now.

There are so many tropes in tv cop dramas.

The top boss always just wants to get the case closed and doesn't care how.

For a female murder victim under 30 the autopsy will reveal she was pregnant.

The perp is the person most unlikely until about 10 mins from the end.

Etc etc

(with that latter 'rule', it means if they only knew they were in a drama the police could solve the case immediately)

The central detective always has a shedload of personal issues and is fundamentally unable to form any meaningful romantic relationships.

Well that describes most of humanity

Speak for yourself!

The average person probably meets 1000+ people on a fairly regular basis during the course of their life
The average person has an average of 3 to 5 close friends

A conversion rate of people I interact with regularly to close friend therefore is at best 0.5%.....this suggests yes people on the whole have an inability to form close personal connections....romantic ones even less so as told by the divorce rate....the number of people reaching 50 years happily married to the same person is tiny

Any idea about that ratio. Asking for a friend

Currently most people managing 50 years is 6% of marriages....however you have to bear in mind in the day they married people regarded marriage as for life more....I expect that percentage to drop rapidly

I am one of those 6%

Congratulations

The BBC has commissioned a legal drama set in the "glossy, high-octane world of Glasgow lawyers".

Counsels will follow "five young lawyers who once trained together at one of Scotland’s elite law schools, but are now scattered across the profession and find themselves facing each other in the courts of Glasgow".

"Some will rise to the top, while others risk losing everything as their careers teeter on the edge when they lock horns in their biggest cases yet," the Beeb said in a press release.

Counsels' "ambitious lawyers must navigate a legal battlefield where their friendships begin to fracture, love affairs crumble, and the fight for justice threatens to tear them all apart."

Sadly, it means the vital work of transactional lawyers in non-contentious roles, poring over documents for hours on end, will continue to go ignored by the telly people.

https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/bbc-capture-glossy-high-octane-world-glasgow-lawyers

This whole tv legal drama thing is getting stale. What I'd like to see for a change (and I think I speak for many) is something focused on an Accountancy practice. There's plenty of thrills and spills there, I can assure you. So let's get a top writing team on that. It can still be set in Glasgow if that's deemed important.

It's notable (to me anyway) that about 15 years ago cop procedurals had obviously gotten stale since most new shows were about various 'consultants' solving crimes as we'd clearly gotten bored of cops doing so. Legal dramas I don't think are so ubiquitous so may have lasted longer.

British TV shows are usually pretty bad anyway so in fairness it may be different now.

There are so many tropes in tv cop dramas.

The top boss always just wants to get the case closed and doesn't care how.

For a female murder victim under 30 the autopsy will reveal she was pregnant.

The perp is the person most unlikely until about 10 mins from the end.

Etc etc

(with that latter 'rule', it means if they only knew they were in a drama the police could solve the case immediately)

The BBC has commissioned a legal drama set in the "glossy, high-octane world of Glasgow lawyers".

Counsels will follow "five young lawyers who once trained together at one of Scotland’s elite law schools, but are now scattered across the profession and find themselves facing each other in the courts of Glasgow".

"Some will rise to the top, while others risk losing everything as their careers teeter on the edge when they lock horns in their biggest cases yet," the Beeb said in a press release.

Counsels' "ambitious lawyers must navigate a legal battlefield where their friendships begin to fracture, love affairs crumble, and the fight for justice threatens to tear them all apart."

Sadly, it means the vital work of transactional lawyers in non-contentious roles, poring over documents for hours on end, will continue to go ignored by the telly people.

https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/bbc-capture-glossy-high-octane-world-glasgow-lawyers

This whole tv legal drama thing is getting stale. What I'd like to see for a change (and I think I speak for many) is something focused on an Accountancy practice. There's plenty of thrills and spills there, I can assure you. So let's get a top writing team on that. It can still be set in Glasgow if that's deemed important.

It's notable (to me anyway) that about 15 years ago cop procedurals had obviously gotten stale since most new shows were about various 'consultants' solving crimes as we'd clearly gotten bored of cops doing so. Legal dramas I don't think are so ubiquitous so may have lasted longer.

British TV shows are usually pretty bad anyway so in fairness it may be different now.

There are so many tropes in tv cop dramas.

The top boss always just wants to get the case closed and doesn't care how.

For a female murder victim under 30 the autopsy will reveal she was pregnant.

The perp is the person most unlikely until about 10 mins from the end.

Etc etc

(with that latter 'rule', it means if they only knew they were in a drama the police could solve the case immediately)

In real life Jessica Fletcher would be convicted based mostly on the statistic of being at the venue of 238 separate murders and pb would then be discussing whether those stats were safely presented to the jury or not.

Personally, I can't work out how she has 87 nieces and nephews.

Fun fact. Angela Lansbury's real-life niece Felicia appeared in a couple of episodes.

Fun fact: Angela Lansbury used to shop at my local supermarket.

For those who enjoy the misuse of the word literally as much as me: a woman at an adjacent table is telling a long and involved story about being allergic to lavender, and a reaction to some sort of cosmetic: 'My face was literally on fire. I was literally burnt to a cinder'.

Should "literally" have been in quotation marks?

But "literally" is being used in the same way as "really", so I'm not sure why pedants seem OK with one but not the other.

I was cold, I was very cold, I was freezing. You don't say "I was very freezing", so if you want to go further you have to use an adverb like "really freezing", "literally freezing" or "fucking freezing". All are fine.

Literally is a helpful word because it helps describe how extreme a situation was, by taking a scenario that might otherwise be deemed a colourful metaphor or exaggeration, and informing someone that it actually happened. 'My kitchen was flooded totally - the hearth rug literally floated out of the door.'. It's a useful rhetorical device being undermined by ignorance.

You might find it 'fine' but then it's also 'fine' if someone comes up to someone else and says 'flubby flub flubber flub'. Nobody gets hurt. It is still not very good English.

So you were confused about whether the person saying "my face was literally on fire" was speaking metaphorically?

Most people can work things out from the context.

It's actually a good way of bringing a dead metaphor back to life. Though that only really works as long as pedants keep complaining, so it's good that they do this service.

I wasn't confused, because it didn't happen to me. And the demerit does not lie in the confusion caused when stupid people abuse the word 'literally' - it lies in no longer being able to use the word 'literally' to describe something that 'literally' happened, because it has become devalued.

But you have just given an example yourself where that meaning of literally was quite clear, so it seems to me that you are the stupid person if anything.

I've explained quite clearly why I don't think this word being used to mean the opposite of its true meaning isn't a positive development in the language. You've given brain farts in response. I think you are reflexively in favour of any change to the language, however ugly or stupid, and probably also in favour of any modern building, however ugly and stupid, and any modern art, however ugly or stupid, because that chimes in with your politics and makes you feel modern. So it seems to me that you're the stupid person if anything.

You start by calling people you disagree with stupid, and when called out on your own stupidity, you go on a rant about how I must love ugly buildings? I think you comprehensively lost whatever argument you were trying to make.

Why is 'literally' such a troublesome word?

TLDR: "Literally" has been used as an intensifier for a long time. It's probably best not to use it in that way, but there's little point in railing aginst people who do.

A major reason why 'literally' gets singled out, is because its (informal) usage is the *antonym* of the word that should be used: 'metaphorically'. The original speaker really meant "My face was metaphorically on fire".

This alone means that many of the 'misuses' of literally are funny when the listener/reader takes the sentence literally.

So what you are literally saying is that literally means metaphorically not literally

That sentence is a nice example of why it is essential that words are capable of having objective and fixable meanings rather than merely being decided by use (pace Wittgenstein etc). If you go by 'use' it is impossible to know what the sentence means.

It was carefully crafted to achieve that objective. Thank you

The greatest thing about our beautiful English language is that there is no authoritarian "regulating" body, like the French language has with the Academie Francaise.

For those who enjoy the misuse of the word literally as much as me: a woman at an adjacent table is telling a long and involved story about being allergic to lavender, and a reaction to some sort of cosmetic: 'My face was literally on fire. I was literally burnt to a cinder'.

Should "literally" have been in quotation marks?

But "literally" is being used in the same way as "really", so I'm not sure why pedants seem OK with one but not the other.

I was cold, I was very cold, I was freezing. You don't say "I was very freezing", so if you want to go further you have to use an adverb like "really freezing", "literally freezing" or "fucking freezing". All are fine.

Literally is a helpful word because it helps describe how extreme a situation was, by taking a scenario that might otherwise be deemed a colourful metaphor or exaggeration, and informing someone that it actually happened. 'My kitchen was flooded totally - the hearth rug literally floated out of the door.'. It's a useful rhetorical device being undermined by ignorance.

You might find it 'fine' but then it's also 'fine' if someone comes up to someone else and says 'flubby flub flubber flub'. Nobody gets hurt. It is still not very good English.

So you were confused about whether the person saying "my face was literally on fire" was speaking metaphorically?

Most people can work things out from the context.

It's actually a good way of bringing a dead metaphor back to life. Though that only really works as long as pedants keep complaining, so it's good that they do this service.

I wasn't confused, because it didn't happen to me. And the demerit does not lie in the confusion caused when stupid people abuse the word 'literally' - it lies in no longer being able to use the word 'literally' to describe something that 'literally' happened, because it has become devalued.

But you have just given an example yourself where that meaning of literally was quite clear, so it seems to me that you are the stupid person if anything.

I've explained quite clearly why I don't think this word being used to mean the opposite of its true meaning isn't a positive development in the language. You've given brain farts in response. I think you are reflexively in favour of any change to the language, however ugly or stupid, and probably also in favour of any modern building, however ugly and stupid, and any modern art, however ugly or stupid, because that chimes in with your politics and makes you feel modern. So it seems to me that you're the stupid person if anything.

You start by calling people you disagree with stupid, and when called out on your own stupidity, you go on a rant about how I must love ugly buildings? I think you comprehensively lost whatever argument you were trying to make.

Why is 'literally' such a troublesome word?

TLDR: "Literally" has been used as an intensifier for a long time. It's probably best not to use it in that way, but there's little point in railing aginst people who do.

A major reason why 'literally' gets singled out, is because its (informal) usage is the *antonym* of the word that should be used: 'metaphorically'. The original speaker really meant "My face was metaphorically on fire".

This alone means that many of the 'misuses' of literally are funny when the listener/reader takes the sentence literally.

So what you are literally saying is that literally means metaphorically not literally

That sentence is a nice example of why it is essential that words are capable of having objective and fixable meanings rather than merely being decided by use (pace Wittgenstein etc). If you go by 'use' it is impossible to know what the sentence means.

It was carefully crafted to achieve that objective. Thank you

The greatest thing about our beautiful English language is that there is no authoritarian "regulating" body, like the French language has with the Academie Francaise.

I think the greatest thing about our beautiful English language is that the Vikings spoke it badly, so we gave up on lots of the complicated grammar in Anglo-Saxon.