Language

Liberal MP Teresa Gambaro swung the full pendulum yesterday, after her ridicluous comments about teaching migrants to use deodorant were published in The Australian.

At first, presumably before Tony Abbott’s office scrambled into damage control mode, Gambaro went on radio to expand on her theory better personal hygene would aid in assimilation. When it dawned on her the rest of the country was in a melt-down of piss-taking she pulled out the classic chestnut - “out of context”. She even put out a statement saying the story was inaccurate.

Then when it became clear there was no context in which her comments, which included the line “Without trying to be offensive” could be taken well, she backed down and apologised.

Continue reading "You stink! Sorry, that was totally taken out of context" »

Like kitsch, schnauzer and – to a lesser extent – gemütlichkeit*, schadenfreude is one of those excitingly guttural expressions that has hitchhiked its way from Germany into English-speaking countries such as Australia.

The loanword is a combination of Schaden (harm) and freude (joy), and describes pleasure taken in other people’s misfortunes.

It’s a phenomenon which can be observed with increasing frequency on internet sites such as failblog.org which revels in human error, embarrassment and outright idiocy.

Continue reading "Laughing at misfortune of others a big moral dilemma" »

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the most amazing and moving moments I have ever experienced. It was in 2006 and I was listening to the national anthems being sung at the Lone Pine memorial service on Anzac day. Surprisingly, what moved me was not the roar of over 10,000 Australians singing our own national anthem, but hearing the thousands of Kiwi pilgrims belting out theirs.

I wasn’t moved at the thought of God defending our mates over the ditch (as the anthem goes), rather it was the first ever time I had heard New Zealanders sing the first Maori verse of their anthem, and it was sung with such gusto and pride.

I was astonished not only that they had been taught the Maori words, but that they were proud enough to sing it so loudly and passionately.  I was jealous of their historic and cultural pride that day.

Continue reading "Advance Australia Fair & Anangula a tjutala" »

Australia is one of the most multi-ethnic societies on earth. As a result, we are living in a kaleidoscope of different cultures and different languages. Among these is one which has always been around.

Ever since democratic politics emerged, and expanding rapidly in recent years, politicians have developed a distinctive language of their own: pollie-speak. This is especially evident among Ministers, but all politicians have learnt to use it.

It is an unusual language. Other languages have developed as a means for people to communicate with each other, with reasonable clarity. Pollie-speak, however, seems to be designed not to communicate but to obfuscate: to make communication unclear, unintelligible, or bewildering.

Continue reading "Moving forward, let me say this on working families…" »

One day, I will tell my four-year-old son that “there’s no place like home” and he will think I’m a genius.

The rest of you, however, will feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to pummel me in the face with a box of Hallmark cards and smugly present me with a “get well soon” card from the same batch.

But why are we taught to avoid clichés like the plague? What’s wrong with using the odd well-worn phrase?

Continue reading "Avoid this cliche-ridden column like the plague" »

“OK before we get going, I’d like to unpack some issues. What I want from you is blue sky thinking, people. A brain dump. Try to wrap your minds around our mission-critical objectives. We’re creating a new design language. There are some terrific synergies right now. This is a unique opportunity to value-add for our stakeholders. Think of it as a paradigm shift. Your time starts now.”

Is it just me or is there an awful lot of corporate speak around at the moment?

It’s worse than two years ago, when Don Watson wrote his third anti-jargon book, Bendable Learnings.

Continue reading "Quit leveraging your dialogue" »

What kind of shape is Australian English in? Is it in top nick, crackerjack, tickety-boo, both beaut and bonza? Or is it showing signs of being cactus, knackered, buggered, stuffed, rooted, possibly even up shit creek, as it succumbs to the continuously rising tide of social media slang, management jargon and Americanisms?

It augurs well for the idiom that anyone who has lived in Orstraya for more than six months would have understood every word in the above three sentences.

But at a time when footy coaches urge their stars to be more accountable, when kids are busy LOL-ing and ROTFLMFAO-ing on Facebook, or declaring on Twitter that the latest Hollywood blockbuster is an “epic fail”, when every seven-year-old girl with a Singstar would rather sound like Miley Cyrus than Missy Higgins, pessimists could be forgiven for thinking that Australian English is in more trouble than the early settlers.

Continue reading "Cactus or crackerjack? The state of Australian English" »

So Miranda Kerr & Orlando Bloom have named their first born Flynn. Flynn? A normal name and spelt correctly?

I must admit I breathed a sigh of relief for the genetically blessed cherub. With two world-famous parents I was expecting baby Bloom to be saddled with a weird, made-up name that would haunt him for the rest of his days.

Something like Apple, Dweezil or Heavenly Hirrani Tiger Lily.

Continue reading "Moon Unit! Tell Apple to leave Peaches alone!" »

Recently, much has been said about the death of the book. Perhaps more accurate though, is the death of words themselves.

Not that this is anything new. Oscar Wilde lamented Victorian England’s loss of meaning through an obsession with politeness, appearances and crustless sandwiches.

However, the difference now is that the meaning of words is decomposing because people use inappropriate synonyms to feel better about their insufficient vocabulary.

Continue reading "Lost words: the death of meaning in language" »

Next time you update your Facebook status or send off an email without checking for spelling errors, think of the children and pick up a hard cover dictionary.

A recent study by the University of Manchester has found that thanks to our predilection for communicating online, we’re raising an entire generation of bad spellers:

“The increasing use of variant spellings on the internet has been brought about by people typing at speed in chatrooms and on social networking sites where the general attitude is that there isn’t a need to correct typos or conform to spelling rules, “ said Lucy Jones, the author of the study.

Continue reading "Long live the dictionary" »

The headline is not a mistake. Escape goats exist - at least, they do in the comment threads of websites everywhere, including The Punch.*

The beauty of this term is that while being appallingly bad English usage in a narrow sense, it is a spectacular conceptual improvement on the very word it butchers. Who needs a scapegoat when you could have an escape goat?

I want an escape goat. Rather than resorting to blame any time there’s any sort of problem, just hop on this conveniently-positioned imaginary beast and ride off, leaving behind only the comical clatter of little hooves, and maybe a faint bleating sound. Baa.

Continue reading "Anonymous comments: why we all need an escape goat" »

Oscar Wilde, the famous 19th century Irish poet once said: “The expletive is the refuge of the semi-literate”.  In other words; swearing is for dumb heads.

Well, all I can say is, if the ‘refuge’ was an actual place, it would be packed to the rafters—considering the number of foul-mouthed ‘dumb heads’ around these days.  And yes, okay, I might be among their number too at times, I admit.  (Before anyone starts calling me a hypocrite because they’ve heard me say naughty words).  Yes, we 21st century folk certainly say lots of words that would’ve made our Victorian ancestors’ hair curl.

As a kid, while I soon became aware of most swear words (mainly thanks to the neighbourhood kids who were clearly more world-wise than me) I would never dare use them.  And, even though my Dad, an ex-army pugilist and a Scotsman to boot (apparently a very bad combo for swear-ability) was always pretty careful not to swear around us kids or in public, I still, in fact, heard my first F Bomb from his own lips.

Continue reading "Foul language gone Wilde" »

The expulsion of an Israeli diplomat this week took me back more than a quarter of a century, to the expulsion of the Soviet “diplomat” Valery Ivanov in 1983. Ivanov had been fingered as a KGB spy, and he was being thrown out for attempting to influence a senior A.L.P. figure, David Combe.

Surrounded by media at the airport, he gave a brief statement in Russian. As he turned to go, a voice rang out: “Could you say that again in Australian?”

Ivanov didn’t bother – he was gone. But the question stuck with me for one reason: it was the first time (though by no means the last) that I was to hear the language we speak referred to, not as English, nor as “Australian English”, but as “Australian”. 

Continue reading "Ostraya, a lucky winner of the linguistic lottery" »

The genius who first used the word “super” to describe the mining profits targeted by the Rudd government in its plan to return the budget to surplus should be given a promotion and a pay rise. Then the government should go out and hire another half dozen people with a similar flair for plain language.

The Resources Super Profits Tax is a rare example of a self-explanatory policy. It not only accurately describes the nature and spirit of the plan, but is infused with political clout. The underlying message is that “super profits” are somehow morally objectionable, compared to the regular kind. The National Health and Hospitals Network, by contrast, is a vague umbrella term for some health reforms.

But just how rare it is to find clarity in government communication is evident from the federal Budget. It is, as usual, filled with technocratic babble. Things aren’t bought, they are procured. Programs don’t end or stop, they are terminated. There is never a cut, but funding is reduced.

Continue reading "The one super phrase in a budget full of babble" »

Another arrival from the crowd that brought us this indecipherable press release, but this time the gobbledegook’s even worse.

SAP Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) today announced the availability of hosted offerings from its channel partners for midsize companies, providing a new delivery channel for SAP solutions for mid-size customers in ANZ.

SAP integration partner CIBER is the first ANZ partner to offer hosting as an alternative to the traditional on-premise deployment option. The hosted offerings allow midsize companies to implement and run SAP® Business All-in-One solutions without the need to hire and train dedicated IT staff to implement and manage the software. SAP Business All-in-One is comprehensive and flexible software for midsize companies with deep industry best practices built-in.

My eyes.

Over to you: translations please?

This just landed in The Punch’s inbox. Can anyone explain what it means?

To meet a growing demand from companies of all sizes for software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) tools that are easy to use, SAP Australia New Zealand today announced the local launch of the SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI OnDemand solution.

Targeted at casual BI users currently under-served by products on the market, the solution will deliver a complete BI toolset in one flexible offering. Leading local on-demand services and solutions provider Sqware Peg is the first local partner to offer customers the new solution, which will provide analytics capabilities for customers using core on-demand solutions. 

Continue reading "Translator required, going forward" »

Call it Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence. Australia has a new arbiter of taste in magistrate Robbie Williams, who has let a student off the hook after calling a police officer a prick.

Williams has enraged police with his ruling but at the same time shown himself in touch with the broader community’s appreciation of the finer points of swearing.

Police are outraged that his ruling appears to condone the verbal abuse of officers, but Williams’s decision explored the delicate way in which swear words change their intensity depending on context. There is also the less delicate reality that some police officers can be quite accurately described as pricks.

Continue reading "Pricking the bubble of polite conversation" »

At the risk of sounding like a language Nazi—to use the daft and offensive term which almost should be banned—it’s time for a voluntary worldwide moratorium on using Nazism as an analogy for anything other than Nazism itself.

A couple of bizarre examples follow from the past week. In the Vatican, a senior member of the clergy has tastelessly likened the (valid) scrutiny of the Catholic Church over child sexual abuse to the persecution of the Jews.

Given the vexed history between Judaism and Catholicism - not to mention the totally non-historical nature of the comparison - the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa should really spend less time nosing through the Bible and more time glancing at the history books.

Continue reading "Nazi way to make a point" »

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave a lesson in how to manage a potential blow-up yesterday with one little Tweet.

As you might have heard, US Vice President Joe Biden got caught by an open mike after introducing President Barack Obama, who was about to announce the passage of his historic health care reforms.

“This is a big f—-ing deal,” the gaff-prone VP said in the President’s ear, loud enough to be audible on television. Gibbs’s Tweet? “And yes Mr. Vice President, you’re right…”

Continue reading "Sometimes things are a big (swearword of choice) deal" »

Sorry Sarah Palin – in the war on the “r” word, you can’t have it both ways.

The foxy Fox News contributor and former 1.3-term Governor of Alaska kicked off a skirmish earlier this month when she called on the president to sack his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, for using the word “retarded” during a strategy meeting.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Emanuel, a famously aggressive pit-bull among Obama’s inner circle, called some at the meeting last August “F-ing retarded” for saying they were going to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who weren’t supporting the president’s health care plan.

In a typically folksy post to her Facebook page, which has 1.4 million fans (frightening, but less than Obama’s 7.6 million), Palin responded to a “patriot” from Massachusetts who alerted her to the Journal article.

Continue reading "The R-word, Sarah Palin’s war on “retarded”" »

Are you a fan of The Wreckers? Do you reckon we’re out of the woods? Have you got your Julia Gillard Memorial Hall yet? And crucially, it is “fair suck” or “fair shake” of the sauce bottle?

The Macquarie Dictionary has opened its word of the year competition and there are six nominations in the political category. But we reckon there should be a few more than that. Some suggestions of phrases from 2009 that can be permanently added to the Australian political lexicon are below - add yours in the comments.

Detailed programmatic specificity: Appears to mean, er, a plan. But when you’re Kevin Rudd, why say it clearly in one syllable when you can say it confusingly in 11?

Continue reading "Call for entries: additions to the Punch political dictionary" »

* Warning - this post contains offensive language (actually, it depends a bit on your definition of “offensive”).

F***, f***, f***, f***, f*** and f*** it again. I have just agreed to write a 500 word article over the weekend. What a f****** pain in the arse. I should have said I was too f***** busy and they should get some other stupid f*** to do it.

Gosh, I hope I haven’t offended anyone. Have I used any offensive language? So what is offensive language anyway? You could go to any pub in Sydney and hear language much worse than I’ve used.

But you better not speak like that in front of a police man or woman. Especially if you are being difficult anyway and they are looking for some way to get you under their control.

Continue reading "Heading out tomorrow night - watch your mouth*" »

When Demi Moore was quoted a few weeks ago in W magazine saying “I’d rather be called a puma than a cougar,” I was at first quite pleased. Somehow, puma seemed a nicer name (cougar, to me, sounds as cringeworthy as nails scratching on a blackboard) and I hoped it would catch on.

But after some digesting, it dawned on me that calling women who go out with younger men ‘pumas’ isn’t any more flattering. A puma is still a wild animal who feeds on innocent prey – which is where the term cougar comes from – and is just as offensive.

Demi Moore, shame on you for thinking a prettier word will make you feel better. Besides, it’s not going to catch on. Unfortunately, the cougar is here to stay.

Continue reading "Cougar is a dirty word" »

Imagine our disgust the other night when we went to the Marconi Italian Club only to discover the joint has been overrun by wogs.

“Table for four, signore?” the lippy waiter asked incomprehensibly, so I shot back: “Don’t signore me champ, this is Australia and I didn’t come here to be insulted with your jibber-jabber.”

Speaking slowly and a little bit more loudly to help him understand, I explained that all we wanted was a quick tea - nuggets and chips for the kids, a steak for me and a bowl of spaghetti bolognese for my lady wife.

Continue reading "Speak English and just bring us the damned gelati" »

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today said that the Government was moving with “the utmost urgent speed” to fix what might be “perceived as an unfortunate conceptual misalignment” regarding the issue of asylum seekers.

“Up until now we have described our policy as ‘tough but humane’, however from now on the correct designation will be ‘harsh but kind’,” Mr Rudd said.

The Prime Minister looked annoyed when a reporter suggested that perhaps a better alternative might be “sweet and sour”. “Let me say this, do I apologise for saying what I mean and meaning what I say? Not withstanding the various qualifications existent for meeting the dynamic fluidity of changing contingencies,  no, I do not apologise, not in the slightest,” Mr Rudd said.

Continue reading "Unapologetically tough and unapologetically fair" »

It’s a little-known fact, but not long ago the Commonwealth Government hired some corporate management consultants to update our national anthem. The first verse became:

Australians all let us rejoice: National stakeholders going forward should be committed to visionary communications

For we are young and free: For we incubate next-generation scenarios that leverage dynamic functionalities

With golden soil and wealth for toil: With mission critical infrastructure to maximise world-class deliverables

Our home is girt by sea: Our brickware harnesses frictionless supply chain scenarios.

Continue reading "Global Frankness Crisis contributed to the GFC" »

I admit it:  I’m in danger of being a language bore.

I’m that guy who, when you say you’re ‘honing in’ on something, asks derisively if you’ve ever heard of a honing pigeon or a honing missile.

If you call me a ‘font of information’, I’m liable to take offence on the grounds that a font is a shallow bowl used for church christenings, and I’d rather be a fount, thank you.

Continue reading "Some key learnings about the debasement of language" »

So, “butter would not melt in his mouth”, Kevin apparently has a robust vocabulary when it comes to privately berating his factional colleagues including females.

Last week he and his cohorts used question time to plead the higher moral ground when it comes to allowing women parliamentarians to speak.

They complained mightily when the Leader of Opposition Business moved that “the speaker be no longer heard” when a female minister was droning on.  But no such criticism for Kevin’s letting fly with the F word with female factional foes that had the temerity to disagree with his point of view.

Continue reading "Our potty-mouthed PM" »

Type the words “Steve Fielding” and “idiot” into Google and you get 14,300 hits. Many of these entries came in the past few days, most of them on blog sites, many of which have one author and as many readers, as the nation’s smarty-pants pundits seized on Fielding’s “fiskal” fiasco as proof that the guy is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Now I’m not going to pretend that my reaction upon seeing the footage of his doorstop spelling bee wasn’t one of unbridled hilarity. I almost spat my coffee out.

And when I’d regained my composure, I called my workmates over to ask if they too had seen the Family First Senator blundering his way through a doorstop where, after referring three times to “physical” policy instead of “fiscal”, he insisted he knew what he was talking about by offering to spell the word.

Continue reading "Please explain this elitist insecurity over language" »

If you took the kids to McDonald’s on the weekend then brace yourself: you may just have landed yourself in hot water with child welfare. While you might claim you were engaging in an entirely innocent and harmless activity that has been going on for decades, you were in fact abusing your kids.

That is if you take the word of UK Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell who recently labelled parents who feed their overweight kids junk food child abusers. Platell was particularly incensed by the failure of a healthy eating plan sponsored by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, due, in her opinion, to parents who insisted on feeding their kids junk food at home.

Platell’s branding such behaviour child abuse is part of a growing trend in which the definition of child abuse has been radically expanded to include pretty well any behaviour or point of view to which someone, somewhere objects. Platell isn’t the only one who subscribes to this view.

Continue reading "Abusing the term “child abuse” is dangerous" »

It’s not a new adage that it takes a community to raise a child, but sometimes the simple assumptions we take for granted need to be brought back into the spotlight to reinforce their relevance.

If we’re to expect to be able to raise well-adjusted children who each have a sense of security and belonging, we need to be progressive in our definition of community – including in our consideration of where our individual responsibility to community starts and ends.

While Australia provides a safe-haven for many thousands of refugees seeking asylum every year, their relief can be short-lived if they fail to adjust to a life so completely different to any they have ever known.

Continue reading "Lost in translation: helping refugees find a voice" »

[*Ed’s note to Gen Y: that isn’t a typo in the headline. It’s a cool joke, and Lucy explains it further down.]

I think I realised I was different when I corrected the grammar of my extremely attractive barista. 

It was a Monday morning; he was frothing milk as we chatted idly about the drunken antics of our respective weekends.  All the usual stuff - the people we knew in common, the places we had almost run into each other, the quality of the cocktail jugs at various Sydney locations.  He might have been carefully watching the temperature gauge rise on that little jug of milk, but we both knew where the real heat was.  Just as I was about to casually invite him to a rock gig he dropped a clanger.

‘Yeah I like World Bar.  Dave and me were there last Thursday.’

Continue reading "Mind your language if you’re making a parse* at me" »

One of the more bracing moments of my adolescence involved going to the movies with a female friend, also in her late teens, to see the French film Betty Blue which opens with an explosive 10-minute sex scene which is arousing enough to fire up an entire retirement village, let alone an 18-year-old lad who is already as toey as a roman sandal.

When Beatrice Dalle finally got around to having her orgasm and the actual dialogue began - aside from the “oui! oui! oui! oui! oui!” spectacle we’d just witnessed - my friend, a hysterical young Francophile who’d just spent an off-year living in Paris, whispered to me: “This just isn’t going to survive the translation.”

Her pretence was eclipsed only by mine as, in the same way that she had a terminal dose of the French, I’d just come back from an off-year living in Mexico, and was so badly afflicted by a showy determination to steer any conversation in the direction of Latin America that it’s remarkable the two of us ever managed to have an intelligible conversation at all…

Continue reading "PM latest victim of bourgeois bilingual showpony disorder" »

It’s tiny but powerful.

Its incorrect insertion could mean the difference between life and death.

And it’s fighting for its very existence.

I’m referring to the apostrophe; specifically, the possessive apostrophe.

Even its proper name – saxon genitive – sounds more like a sexually transmitted disease than the pinnacle of punctuation.

Continue reading "Its time. Sorry, it’s time to save the apostrophe" »

Some years ago The Melbourne Age ran an awkwardly written profile of a young lesbian vegan woman with one leg whom the newspaper reported stood unsuccessfully for the Victorian Upper House on the Australian Democrats ticket.

The piece was picked up and emailed around the country, with the droll observation that it probably wasn’t the only place she’d stood unsuccessfully.

The reason for the humourous response to the piece was not derived around cruelty - you could call it the Peter Cook defence; I have nothing against your right leg. But while there’s nothing funny about having a physical disability, there were plenty of laughs to be had at The Age’s expense, with their clunky and earnest locutions unwittingly creating a solid foundation for a terrific accidental joke.

Continue reading "Debate goes PC as the PM reveals his sauces" »

“Fair shake of the sauce bottle”: That’s the exact quote from a press conference Kevin Rudd has just held where he was accused of failing to promote enough women onto his frontbench.

Mr Rudd went on to say: “Turn it up. Get your hand off it. I mean, fair suck of the sav, Laurie. There’s a s..tload of sheilas and I for one can’t understand the s..torm.” Well alright he didn’t actually say that but it would have been nice if he did.

Continue reading "Enough sheilas? C’mon, fair shake of the sauce bottle" »

Take note Lleyton Hewitt - the phrase “spac attack” is now on the banned list. And while he’s normally the kind of bloke who would rail against political correctness, it’s National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce who agreed to put it there.

Joyce will tonight apologise on television for saying Kevin Rudd had thrown a “spac attack,” after the Spastic Centre called on our political leaders to stop using the word “spastic” as a term of abuse.

“I would like to blame ‘Kylie Mole’ from the 1980’s Comedy Company but I should have understood the derivation of this word,” he told The Punch yesterday afternoon. “I generally can not stand political correctness but this definitely deserves an exception.”

Continue reading "“Spac attack” banned - Senator about to apologise" »