Surviving Wars: Easy If You're a Building.

 A friend of mine lamented to me the other day that nobody knows how to write anymore.

 It’s a common complaint; right now, the government appears to be in the process of realising that the nation’s youth are as so thick that GCSEs are going to need to be scrapped in favour of something easier to spell. (“O” Levels, apparently.)
 The decline of literacy and education has been discussed and fretted over ever since Shakespeare’s day, but my hyper-keen unemployment senses have picked up on something: We’re not just crap at reading, writing and arithmetic. We’re starting to lose our grip on the spoken word, too.
 Tonight I found myself watching a documentary programme on whales and dolphins, and the commentator came out with this little nugget of wisdom: The arctic ocean is the hardest place for a whale to survive.
 I’m not a biologist, but I’m pretty sure whales would have a harder time surviving in, say, the Atacama Desert, where there hasn’t been any moisture for 200 years.
 Or downtown Tokyo.
 Whales probably wouldn't even survive in Wales.
 I’d be willing to dismiss it as a moment of sloppy narration, except it comes hot on the heels of a radio advert I heard yesterday celebrating the legacy of a local theatre.
 The Bristol Hippodrome, I was reliably informed, had survived two world wars.
 Two world wars is kind of a reach. World War Two, I’ll give them. Bristol got bombed more often than George Best in World War Two, and the Hippodrome survived it.
 But World War One? Really?!
 I’m no more of a historian than I am a biologist, but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t that much heavy fighting in downtown Bristol during World War One.
 Alright, that’s a lie - there’s heavy fighting in downtown Bristol every time the pubs kick out - but unless my soon-to-be-worthless GCSE History classes lied to me, all the participants pretty much agreed to send their troops to France to get butchered. In the Great War, small theatres in the west country weren’t high on the list of targets for the German artillery.
 I myself have survived wars in Somalia, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf (twice) and some pretty serious uprisings in Libya and Egypt, not to mention OJ Simpson’s murder spree on my ninth birthday.
 I say “survived,” but I meant it in the Bristol Hippodrome sense that I was physically present in the world, but in another country at the time.

                                  [I don’t know what a hippodrome does, so I’m guessing it’s this.]

 I get that nobody is perfect, linguistically. We all make little errors here and there. But it’s troubling when actual paid broadcasters start making such sweeping, catch-all statements without any evidence of thinking them through.
 If narrators on BBC documentaries and advocates for theatres can’t use their words with reliable accuracy, we're all, like, oh my god, literally, fucked.