●When possible and appropriate to the particular blog, birth/death years are given in brackets after all deceased people.
●Titles of books, newspapers, films, songs, etc are italicised.
●As this blog is mainly written in English, that language is usually used rather than Welsh when there are two distinct names for a place (eg: Whitchurch not Eglwys Newydd, Swansea not Abertawe). When the English is a bastardisation or translation of the original Welsh or pronounced more or less identically, I use the Welsh (eg: Caerffili not Caerphilly, Llanisien not Llanishen). This isn’t an iron-clad rule, so there will be exceptions, for instance where a dialect ‘Wenglish’ version has become embedded (eg: Roath not Y Rhath), or where the English version is so familiar that using the Welsh looks phoney (eg: Cardiff not Caerdydd). On rare occasions there is cause to use both versions of a name, to differentiate between separate places (eg: Maerdy in the Rhondda Fach and Mardy in Gwent), and in one case I use three: Rhymni (the river), Rumney (the Cardiff suburb) and Rhymney (the Gwent town).
●There are no such places as “South Wales” and “North Wales” (try to find them in an atlas). Upper-case ‘s’ and ‘n’ would only be correct with proper nouns like “University of South Wales” and “South Wales Police” and Wales is neither Korea nor Dakota. The adjectival use of ‘south’ and ‘north’ (as well as ‘west’ and ‘mid’, for that matter) when attached to Wales is always lower-case on this blog, and usually I prefer to avoid chopping Wales up in this pointless way (I recently received a postcard addressed to “Cardiff, South Wales” – presumably to differentiate it from the Cardiff in “North Wales”?) and instead tackle this small country as a whole unit. Divide and rule is an age-old strategy designed to sabotage the actualisation of Wales as an entity.
●I ignore the baubles conferred by the British State, unless part and parcel of identity. Therefore, for instance, I put no “Sir” in front of Kier Starmer, “Dame” in front of Shirley Bassey, “Lord” in front of James Callaghan or “MBE” after Cerys Matthews, but the various Marquesses of Bute are assigned the peerages that defined them.
●The concept of taboo words is nonsensical, prudish, censorious and hypocritical, so occasionally there will be “bad language” on this blog when no other word will suffice.
●I enjoy punctuation, consider it a minor art form in itself and reject the limiting strictures of uptight grammarians. An exclamation mark, for instance, can bring an extraordinarily wide range of moods to a sentence considering it’s merely a vertical bar above a full stop!
●A number of posts in the blog archive are ongoing works in progress that are periodically updated as and when new information arises or circumstances change. Usually they are the posts striving to be definitive compendiums of whatever topic is being covered (eg: Cardiff killings, Famous Cardiffians, How Gay is my Valley, Teach yourself American, etc).