I must confess to having laughed once or twice at some of the things Matt Witters has said, and in his column in Wales on Sunday today he more than doubled his score. He said:
... but still, it's better than the royal coverage people have been getting in the United States.
Take Atlanta's WSBTV, which sought to enlighten its viewers about the blushing couple's marital home of Anglesey.
"Despite the majority of Welsh speakers living in the southern areas of Wales, the bulk of the language's authors and poets come from Anglesey," it reported, pointing out that speaking Welsh "goes hand in hand with being a Welsh separatist".
What's more, if you wonder where Welsh people's names are from, most apparently tend to "adopt one's region as a surname". Yee-ha!
I thought I'd take a look at the article itself, and this is what it actually said:
Despite the majority of Welsh speakers living in the southern areas of Wales, the bulk of the language's authors and poets come from Anglesey and the immediately surrounding areas of north Wales ...
Being a Welsh speaker often goes hand in hand with being a Welsh separatist. Roughly 70 percent of Anglesey's population are Welsh speakers. The island's representative in Wales' government is Ieuan Wyn Jones, head of Plaid Cymru – a political party whose members have long sought to break from the United Kingdom and make Wales an independent country.
Owain Môn was born and raised on Anglesey and is so fiercely proud of his roots that he uses the old Welsh tradition of adopting one's region as a surname. His name more or less translates to: "Owain of Anglesey".
Yee-ha ... or ha, ha?
Well, I suppose we must thank Matt for his ability to completely misunderstand what he reads; for it provides us with a very timely demonstration that far too many people in Wales lack basic literacy skills. It's something that we must tackle while our children are at school ... if only to ensure that future generations of Wales on Sunday reporters don't provide us with similarly misleading stories.
I'm sure that's what he intended.
