Terminal 5: the true horror

No, I have not had the misfortune to visit the new Terminal 5 at  Heathrow today, Thursday. But the husband has. Though, happily for him, he was arriving rather than trying to leave (hand baggage only, if your flight wasn’t cancelled).

The whole experience started brightly enough. The check-in at Athens was serving champagne (and juice for the minors) to celebrate T5 day. But things got darker pretty quickly when he discovered that, owing to problems at the new Terminal, the flight was delayed by two hours.

When it did finally take off, the cabin crew had stories that went rather beyond the official line of  “teething troubles with the baggage system”.

They had apparently turned up for work as usual this morning, but with no information on the security system for entry to Terminal 5, which slowed down their getting onto the planes considerably -- and started the rot.

The flight itself was fine and made up some of the lost time, but when it got to Heathrow, the plane sat  on the tarmac for most of the time that it had made up, then another 15 minutes while they tried to get the jet-way to link to the plane.

The scene on the ground was reminiscent of a police state, rather than a cradle of democracy. The most prominent officials were not those of BA, nor even the battalions of electricians trying to patch the system up, but larger battalions of burly cops carrying their prominent military hardware.

But no one in any kind of uniform could tell him either how to get to the Piccadilly line (were they on commission to Heathrow Express?), nor which loos might be in working order (answer: one in the departure lounge). When he did finally get to the tube (again via the departure lounge) the automatic gates refused to take the return to Heathrow he had bought at Cambridge. No point in changing his mind now. By this time he’d been told that the Heathrow Express wasn’t working anyway.

We’ve read all these articles about the dry runs being practised at this Terminal for weeks. Did none of these pretend first class arrival passengers from Sydney ask for the Piccadilly line? Or expect a working loo?

The irony was that the new BA glossy brochure about the wonders of T5 arrived this very morning. “So calm, you’ll just flow through . . .” it promised. “Intuitive design makes your journey through Terminal 5 easy and carefree”, accompanied by a picture of one of the 131 escalators.

Great if they’re working.

Comments

[Michael Bulley]

To answer Tony Francis's question below (above?) about translating "efficiency": some of those words might have been contenders but, as I had been asked to put it into elegiacs, consecutio and efficax were out of the running.

He also asks where the phrase "Efficiency is a defiantly human..." comes from? I think it comes from Nicholas Wibberley in these pages.

[Marco Polo]

Yes, delayed luggage is a lot more important than having to enter your finger prints into the Matrix database for nor obivous or legal reason.

Ant colonies of the 21st century, or freedom, folks? It's our choice.

[Tony Francis]

Do you people realize there are 1319 different articles on the subject "fricative" in Wiki? I had never heard of it before, but that seems like a frickin' lot to me.
Concerning M. Bulley's translation of "efficiency": I really don't have an argument with his choice. But what about "effect" or "consequence"; "effectus"; "eventus"; "consecutio"? Or "effectual" or "efficacy": "efficiens" "efficax" or "efficientia"?
Just where did this phrase "Efficiency is a defiantly human..." come from? I can't find it by googling.
Anyway, in the mean time, here is a thought from Prokofiev (Op. 62 No. 2 "Pensees"):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaNgu2dcpC0
Why did she just play No. 2? There are three of them and they are usually performed together. Why has no one else published these on You Tube? (There are about 10 recordings of Liszt's Funerailles, including one from the 1930s by Horowitz which is the best, other than the one he did in 1951.)

[PL]

Richard--- I take your point about initial "f": the fricative sound is indeed not the same thing as aspiratio, or "rough breathing". The interesting variants in its pronunciation, it seems to me, depend on how forcibly the upper teeth bite into the lower lip and the sound is forced out between them. When initial "f" is uttered with some expression of violence it seems the natural beginning to an imprecation of angry, contemptuous insult. Common insults of that kind exist in at least three languages-- English, Italian, and Swedish. The notion that the emotion driving and expressed in these locutions has some natural association with the sensation of biting into one's lower lip and forcing out sound between lip and teeth is supported by the fact that the "f"-words that begin the imprecations in the three languages have all different meanings-- the Italian expression is roughly the same insult as the familiar English expression, but the Italian "f" word, "fa'", simply means "do"; while the Swedish "f" word, "fan" , is simply a "devil". I wonder if there are similar expressions in other languages. If my theory is right, there ought to be. That initial "v" seems to have none of the emotional impact of initial "f" may have to do with there being a less forcible expulsion of breath accompanying the voiced labio-dental. fricative. But is it less? I'd be curious to know if any real phoneticians have ideas about this.

[Tony Francis]

Dearest posters, all:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaos
and, please recall that Agent 86 and the enchanting agent 99 of CONTROL constantly battled the evil KAOS in Get Smart:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_smart

[Richard]

Dear Paulo,
Read my post: I didn't assert that "keep" had an "extra puff of aspiration," but that the Greek letter chi did.

However, I have indeed expressed myself misleadingly. What I was trying to convey was of course that the letter "chi" (and its transliteration as ch) expressed "unvoiced palatal with aspiration". You are right, of course, that we (i.e., "we speakers of English") tend to pronounce initial stops with aspiration *anyway*, and as such my use of "keep" and "can" as if they were examples of unaspirated and unvoiced stops was false and misleading...
On the other hand, this was not much more likely to mislead than to say that
"Greek "kappa" would have been pronounced much more like our "g" (as in "good")"
which simply encourages confusion between (un)aspirated and (un)voiced.

So perhaps we should both learn some more phonetics - or, rather, learn to express what phonetic we do know in a more precise way.

My point in any case was that, contrary to what it seemed that Lord T. was suggesting, there is no historical reason to spell "chaos" as "kaos", which is a point concerning etymology and the conventions of transliteration rather than phonetics as such. I take it you agree with this...

PL - I don't think it can be right to cite differing pronunciations of initial fricative "f" as if it were an instance of the same phenomenon...

Best wishes,
Richard

[PL]

To hear the difference between aspirated and un-aspirated stop consonants compare how an English speaker says "pizza" with the way an Italian pronounces the same word. If you can do a good Italian accent you can feel the difference on a wet finger held before your lips. The aspirated "p" in the English loan word will chill the finger, the un-aspirated Italian "p" will not. The Italian sound is more "clipped" ("ejected", as Paulo has now taught me to say)-- to our ears it sounds almost like a "b", but un-voiced. Mutating the mutanda, the same goes for initial "f", "t", and "hard" "c"; and goes for French, Spanish, and many other languages. Apparently ancient Greek distinguished aspirated and un-aspirated forms of the stops and used them as distinct phonemes: viz. pi vs. phi, tau vs. theta, kappa vs. chi.

Richard,

There is really no "extra puff" of aspiration of "k" in the English word "Keep". The English "k" is aspirated (as are many other English consonants), unless they occur at he end of a word, when they are "ejected" (no aspiration), but not "voiced" like "g" in "good". The Greek "chi" is properly the English "k" (word initial}. The Greek "kappa" would have been pronounced much more like our "g" (as in "good") and the Greek "phi" is the English "p" and the Greek "pi" is much more like our "b", but ejected, not voiced.

It sounds like you need a bit of education in phonetics before you write about this.

Paulo

[Nicholas Wibberley]

At the risk of seeming importunate, I am back. This time with a mea culpa; I have been too flippant; Mary has a serious problem; it behoves us to persevere. I have been extending Michael Bulley’s journey from Scotland to the middle of France by travelling from the middle of France (30 km east of Limoges) to the south of Spain (midway between Murcia and Granada). They have opened an autopista (A 60 something or other) south of San Sebastian, completely obviating the erstwhile passage through those precipitous, but delicious mountain passes, and I had time to think. Approaching Burgos, a possibility occurred; success here may lie, not in skirting the invitation but in driving straight through it. What about a speech, itemising and glorifying every Socratic contribution to two and a half millennia in a manner not even the opposition could match. But dinner? The political situation would be highly tenuous; does Mary deserve hemlock? God forbid!

[Richard]

According to the OED sv. "flask" it is unclear whether the root travelled from late Latin into Teutonic langs. or vice versa.
It seems to be first visible ca.600 (AD).
R

[PL]

Reading that first sentence again, I see what Lord Truth meant. A comma after "Terminal" would have helped make that clear (an apostrophe in "husbands" would have been nice too, but not everyone has all day to devote to these effusions.

[Tony Francis]

Dearest Richard: I hate to complain, but when you write "chaos is derived from Greek chaos", it appears that you have written chaos is from chaos. Oh, I understand you are telling us about "X", etc. Speaking of chaos, one site declares that chaos was really a god:
http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/greek-mythology.php?deity=CHAOS
They indicate no one knows much about Chaos, and request people post their thoughts on the subject. While I can't claim to know Chaos, I have met several of her daughters. If some girls are bum magnets, then I have always been a Chaos magnet. It isn't something I am proud of. It is just the way it is. Speaking of Chaos, I am now planning to repair the Quia Emptores article on Wiki. Instead of adding things piece-meal, I am writing it all under separate heading, then will stealthily put it all on the site, preferably at night. I went down to the WSU library and checked out several great sources: Maitland, Pollock and Plucknett, all on the Common Law. The girl at the check out desk told me I could have them 'til April 28, unless someone called for them before. I said, "Are you kidding? No one is going to call for these. No one has checked them out since the last time I checked them out, more than a year ago!" I thought it was funny. She, aparently, didn't. In this, though, Wiki is my perfect lover. Wiki is the total personification of CHAOS. Speaking of which:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
which leads to:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharkovskii%27s_theorem
Notice they say: f:R -^ R with R a continuous function. Well, there you have it: there can be only limited congruity with reality! I fear I shan't be posting much here, anymore. There is just too much reading to do on Quia Emptores. And that related article on Quo Warranto is sadly in neglect. It seems there may be a troll with a nasty attitude on that particular entry. We shall see!

[PL]

Shakespeare's Ulysses summed up Lord Truth nicely: "Take but degree away, and all things meet in mere oppugnancy" (from Latin "ob", against, and "pugno", I fight"). By the way, "fiasco" (allied to our "flask") is Italian, not classical, and is (I'm pretty sure) Germanic in origin. The philologically challenged Lord Truth also seems to think "despite" means "because of" (see his first sentence); but that may have been an inadvertency due to haste of composition.
Apart from these, and other nits hardly worth picking, I owe it to Lord Truth to say that, for me at least, his diatribe gives off as much light as heat. Among other things it reminded me, to my considerable satisfaction and amusement, of something the aggressive behavior of my fellow Yanks often makes me forget: that it was the Brits who not only invented the word "one-upmanship" but (in their inimitably deep way, which we can never see to the bottom of) still excel at the thing.

[Richard]

"Chaos" is derived from Greek "chaos" with initial chi: the one that looks like Roman alphabet x and is usually transliterated ch or kh (because it was pronounced as a k sound as in "keep", "can" but with an extra puff of aspiration, which when put into the Roman alphabet was indicated by the letter h). It meant "gap" or "void".

"kaos" if it existed would probably mean "burning" (from "kaio" "I kindle a fire, make to burn"). But in fact it only exists as a word conjectured by grammarians as an etymology of "chaos" (a false etymology: in fact "chaos" comes from the root of the verb "chasko" "I open up, make a gap, yawn").

I quite disagree with Lord Truth: the masters of money, be they bankers or the management of airlines, are accustomed to justify their vast remuneration and power (and to ask for more) by reference to the supposed efficiency and effectiveness of private industry by comparison with other parts of the national community. When the falsehood of this is especially apparent, it ought to be pointed out.

Best wishes,
Richard

[Lord Truth]

I'm sorry Prof Beard has jumped on the bandwagon trashing Terminal 5-despite the husbands stressful experiences.The British media is presently full of comments pouring forth anger in the usual self hating British way that really makes living in Britain so tiring,all repeating those familiar classical terms 'fiasco' and chaos (or kaos of course to Beard)
Lord Rees Mogg even has an article in The Times headed contemptuously-'We're Only Successful at Grand
Failures 'citing the Dome and Wembley Stadium.Beard I believe is interested in historic buildings even WW2 bomb shelters-cannot she give T5 a chance? The biggest building in Britain,probably the second biggest in Europe-capacity thirty million-surely problems in its first week of probably a forty yearlifespan is not so contemptible-they occur regularly at new airports.
Of course Rupert is rolling around with laughter in NYC ,cracking his transatlantic whip over the backs of his Wapping slaves-'Give me more 'he cries-more photos of those huddled masses yearning to breathe free,of the long long trails awinding to the only working toilet-then back he jumps into the pool to hold up the drowning head of NYCs financial pre-eminence-(it wont work Rupe, LT is never wrong-NYC is going down-Londinium is going up)
In fact although the Dome exhibition was a disgrace-Britains science and technology totally neglected,it renovated hundreds of acres of derelict wasteland ,removed the ugliest gas works in Europe and is now a great success as is Wembley,as will be T5
Of course Dunkirk was something of a fiasco and pretty kaotic too but somehow it all ended O.K.
I sense however a sensible reluctance of furriners to enter this fray.They stand nervously on one side,curling their toes in embarrassment at this strange British rite of self disparagement,this snarling masochistic rolling in excrement,knowing that in every other country these problems would be passed off as teething troubles followed by a great sense of pride.
What lies behind this nonsense?
First there is some truth here that a Spanish company is probably not neccessarily going to do the best for the British (the Armada and all that)-but as Brown has allowed every great British company to be sold to foreigners(unlike the Amricans)that is part of Britains strange game.And the baggage handlers -one must never suggest they are mostly illegal immigrants...
Yet there is more to this.
Britain has not the same kind of democracy as the US or France etc.It is essentially a Medieval feudal Asian style society obssessed with status, saving face,and superiority-at all levels, from the loving dad putting down his daughter showing off her new dress with a sneery 'Well who thinks shes a little princess now eh?'to the handshake game-How do you do?(Americans not getting the message reply 'Fine thanks'when the proper reply is of course 'How do YOU do?-(I'm the superior one condescending to you).I've watched Japanese executives and their wives meeting in Tokyo restaurants-they first bow 25 degrees-the second 45-the third 65-soon everyone is sticking their arse up in the air like at an orgy.Then Beards pals invite you to High Table-you sit opposite Prof.Klever-Dik-small talk-then you ask -'In your last book I wondered if you felt the Nasturtions would have beaten the Geraniums if the weather hadnt changed?Problem-asking questions means equality as does answering..Solution? Prof.KD looks at watch-I say could you help me-Great palpitations-Of course-Do you know the score in the Chelsea-Manchester United match?-Punch in stomach-slap in face-BUT supposing you did know the score?'Actually Arsenal are leading three to one'-Now Prof KD knocked to floor but gets up-returns fire-frowns -I'm so sorry but I simply cant waste my time talking about football -I must prepare my speech for the Nobel ceremony Goodbye...
So what about T5?
The mass of British people live in a democratic world but with their masters always above them.When this was deferential -no problem -deferentiality created a link between high and low-all great events -entities etc united them-reflected all society-made people proud to be part of something.My grandmother was a cook housekeeper to the rich and the gentry,probably never earned more than thirty shillings a week in her life,yet she worshipped the people she worked for and was proud of her country.A fool? Perhaps, but a satisfied fool
Now deferentiality has gone but 'Them UpThere' remain due to complexities of class culture history etc. There is now no link between the groups ...and huge resentment builds up as democracy which seems to be so prevalent is seen to be false and ultimately limited.
So ..when you read these self hating comments remember you are not watching a bright young man with a mortgage and a new car making a serious comment.You are watching a bitter resentful 14th Century illiterate peasant shaking his fist at the music and dancing coming from the new 4 billion wing of his masters castle..

[Michael Bulley]

By request, here's Nicholas Wibberley's "Efficiency is a defiantly human preoccupation and means nothing to the spiders in the palace of the Caesars"

Caesaris in tectis telam suam aranea texit
nec pensat sed homo uult numerare polum.

Glossary and historical linguistics lesson: pensare means to weigh up, balancing one thing against another. That was my attempt at the idea of "efficiency". It is where the French verb penser, meaning to think, comes from. You can hear the weighing idea also in the English verb, to ponder, which comes from the Latin ponderare.

[anthony.alcock@arcor.de]

Dieser Zug fährt nicht weiter. Die Fahrt endet hier.
Clearly "Endstation" and "terminus" have lent themselves to the use of verbs of which the subject is the form of transport and not the process of travel itself.

[PL]

The appearance of absurdity in the notion that a train somehow "terminates" at its last station is due to a mere verbal misunderstanding. "Train" in the required sense is analogous to "flight". A train terminates at a rail terminus in the same sense that a flight termnates at an air terminal. Though the same plane may then fly somewhere else, its new passengers are on a different flight. And in the same way, the same carriages that constituted the train arriving at Brighton at noon may go back to Victoria at 1:00 pm, but are then a different train. The apprehension of absurdity comes from mistakenly thinking of a "train" as a thing like a ship or a camel, when (historically and essentially) it is more like a convoy or a caravan.

[Lidwina]

"Dieser Zug endet hier." Nothing mysterious about that. It means you have to get out because it is not going anywhere else. A terminus is where buses and trains finish their journeys (I would expect a classicist to know that instinctively).

This may be misleading for Heathrow T5, because it seems no-one is getting anywhere, you can't terminate if you never started. Or maybe you finish some internal journey to inner peace, the terminal of all abandoned hopes. At last some time in limbo to complete all those broken off thought processes.

In real life I am a software person. A fiasco of this scale (and I have seen a few) can only mean that someone saved by cutting back on the test and integration phase, a common mistake in projects led by committee.

[Michael Bulley]

To Richard: Michael Bulley has spent the day travelling from the north of England to the middle of France, so I've been out of touch, but I'll give it a go. Apologies to Nicholas Wibberley for calling him Thomas in the preface to my non-Ovidian couplet.

[anthony alcock]

I would have thought efficiency is exactly what spiders are about. In fact, all non-human organisms. They just do it. Simplicity may have a certain amount to do with it, I suppose.

Many years ago in the Biology Dept of the Humboldt University I came upon this pearl of wisdom (translated here):

Industrious but never shrill
The leaf produces its chlorophyll.

German has a similar sentence spoken on public transport near the end of journeys, which perplexes some Germans just as much as the English one baffles some English people (This train terminates here):

Dieser Zug endet hier.

[Paul Potts]

Why do they have to call it a "terminal"? A terminal what? And isn't "Heathrow" dangerously near "Deathrow"? It's another Dome, I mean Doom, and the real problem is how to get out once you're there. To the West Country? You must be joking.

Paulo

[Richard]

Where is Michael Bulley? I think that "Efficiency is a defiantly human preoccupation and means nothing to the spiders in the palace of the Caesars" requires translation into Latin elegiacs (sounds quite Ovidian to me, so disyllabic ending to the pentameter required - but you know the rules).
Best,
Richard

[Nicholas Wibberley]

Efficiency is a defiantly human preoccupation and means nothing to the spiders in the palace of the Caesars.

[anthony alcock]

Penso che un incubo cosi non ritorni mai piu (adapted from Volare).

[AJ]

The degree of incompetence is made clear when one realises that a few years ago, Denver Airport had a similar set of disasters- much publicized- with its new baggage handling system. So if I was opening a new terminal, or an airline looking to use one, one of the first questions I would ask "how do I learn from the baggage disaster at Denver"? Perhaps they discovered uniquely new problems to do with modern baggage systems, but any inquiry should start with whether the lessons of Denver were applied here.

[Peter Richardson]

I was followed into a gents loo at Heathrow by a lady pushing a luggage cart. Before we got too far, I asked her what she was looking for. "Goats" she replied. Holding my tongue about old goats who might be in the gents, I then asked her how many? "About 4,000" was her reply. Definitely not the place to find that many there, so I led her away. She was, in fact, quite sane, just driven by the objective of her trip, which was to find that many four-legged animals to take to Portugal, and having been told English goats were the best in Europe, here she was, and with the absence of doors just thought I knew a quick way onwards. I apologized that I knew more about sheep than goats, but the least I could do was lead her conspiratorially to the Underground. Fellow passengers can be fascinating, and signage is not always understood.

[Xjy]

"...reminiscent of a police state". I was going on about airport "security" and police states at the office yesterday and my dear sweet colleague felt so uncomfortable. He couldn't deny the similarities, much as he wished to. The best he could manage was a very unconvincing "it's for our own good", "it's to protect us". At least he's not into scapegoating or demonizing - but he's far too willing to let others do it for him.

[Cec Hogarth]

When I was a tech writer back in the early 90's, my boss, with lots of experience inoftware, PC hardware and "high-end" audio/video systems, had an axiom about cutting-edge technology. We knew it as the "Billings Principle". It is brief. "Nothing ever works with anything else."