Archive for the 'Language' Category


Tongue numbing

Published
by
drew
on 16 June 2008
at 16:34
in Adelaide, Featured, Idea v. Reality, Language and Media
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1 Comment

For any readers outside South Australia, there’s been a recent crisis in this state’s hospital industry, with doctors and other specialists arguing over wage increases. Related story here.

The issue has come to a head and many emergency doctors and staff have not just gone on strike but resigned their positions altogether.

Take that!

I’d like to put out a message to directors of TV and radio outlets now, as it’s timely. I’m mostly a humble guy and don’t like to blow my own trumpet, as it were. I don’t think I’m arrogant or self-righteous and I don’t often judge or condemn people. However, there are times when I believe a base level of competence should go along with certain jobs. So my message is this.

If you’re running a Radio or TV newsroom, please get in touch with me and offer me a job. Why? Well, for starters, I can correctly pronounce the word anaesthetist.

Seriously, I should put this on my résumé.

It’s been an interesting week of watching and listening to various media, hearing them say that word and completely fuck it up in about 90 % of cases.

Another word a lot of journos have trouble with is vulnerable. People, the first l is NOT SILENT.

If you hear a newsreader or reporter this week saying “South Australia’s health industry is in a vulnerable position following the recent mass-resignation of emergency doctors and hospital anaesthetists,” listen for the gurgling sounds that follow as their throats go into spasm and they invariably choke on their tongues.

I once met a med student studying to become an anaesthetist and she couldn’t pronounce it. While I hope she, and other anaesthetists, can successfully pronounce the drugs they’re administering, I’m not going to judge, as long as the right drug goes in the right patient and everyone who’s supposed to be alive, stays alive at the end of the day.

But journalists? They’re supposed to be guardians of the language. They’re the one group of people who are supposed to get this right.  Still, when most people on TV news are either ex-footballers (read: trained monkeys (and even then, I’m not that sure how well trained)) and sexy young uni grads with zero life experience, what hope is there?

Fair dinkum French

Published
by
drew
on 23 December 2007
at 22:41
in Language
.
1 Comment

So I was in one of those faux French franchises the other day that sells cake and coffee. Mike’s Bakery doesn’t have that ring to it but if you translate it roughly into French, then you take on the gourmand associations of the Gallic people.

And, you’d think, if you were going to pass yourself off as French, you could at least get to know a few of the words you might have to deal with in a cake shop. I’m not saying you need to become fluent or even be able to sing the fucking Marseillaise but if you’re going to try to pass yourself off as a patissèrie,  then learn the difference between an éclair, a tart and a petit four.

And it’s really important to know, in case you want to sell more than one cake, how to write their names in the plural. And, that you don’t make the mistake of using an apostrophe with a plural s as many illiterate shop owners do.

The one thing you don’t want to have at the top of a column on your menu is

GATEAUX’S

No. You just don’t.

Black kettles

Published
by
drew
on 20 November 2007
at 22:06
in Australia, Language and Media
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0 Comments

I both admire and loathe Alexander Downer. I admire that he’s educated and articulate and very well able to make a point; however I loathe that he seems unable to do so without coughing up a torrent of ad hominem invective.

I was driving home tonight listening to PM. (Not to the PM: to the ABC radio program) With an election on in a minute there was the daily recap of who said what about whom and why that who or whom is not fit to run the country. You know the drill.

Anyway, today Alexander, talking of Mr Rudd, came out with this:

The contradictions in his policies, the platitudes, the clichés that just roll off the lips of Mr Rudd every day, the sort of cocky little smirk with a bunch of clichés and slogans, you know, at the end of the day I don’t think that’s going to wash with the Australian public.

Platitude? Cliché? Anyone?

Disappointing

Published
by
drew
on 17 July 2007
at 08:57
in Language and Media
.
2 Comments

Phillip Adams, in his column in The Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday, used the expression ‘comprised of’.

And I thought he was so intellectual.

Am I first?

Published
by
drew
on 3 July 2007
at 20:45
in Language and Media
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0 Comments

I know there will be (and probably already has been - I’ve been a little slow on the uptake of late) a lot of opinionating and joke-making about the foiled car bombs in London recently. (And it okay to make jokes because no one died).

Now, because it was allegedly doctors behind the bombs, can I coin the phrase Terroristes sans frontières?

Bugger. I just googled it and it threw up nine results.Still, top ten in the world… I’ll take that.

Tiny laff

Published
by
drew
on 7 June 2007
at 15:41
in Bairn and Language
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2 Comments

I know the joke has been made many many times, about how some words end in -ough and have different pronunciations.

In fact, I think I read somewhere that the word duff is derivative of the word dough. Or was it the other way around?

That aside, for some reason I seem to be gaining some kind of titillatory amusement from the word ploughing, when pronouncing it ploffing.

We have the book Terence, from the Thomas the Tank Engine series and in it, we meet Terence ploughing a field. Whenever I come to that bit (whether reading it to one of the bairn, or, y’know, by myself on the train perhaps) I quietly snigger to myself.

I don’t know why. Maybe it sounds a bit rude.