Language

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" »