The best comment imaginable on Governor Spitzer’s fall from grace came on this evening’s news from Jody ‘Babydoll’ Gibson: “he thought he was impenetraitable”.
Mar 132008
Feb 092008
It makes no sense complaining about the decline of the printed word. As it becomes just another medium, we are moving to a kind of multimedia literacy, where capability with print becomes no more important, or useful, than capability with image.
Graeme Philipson in The Age this week.
Philipson has three main arguments, all familiar:
1. New media don’t supplant old media – the ‘people still go to the movies’ argument.
2. People are busily writing emails and reading text online so it’s only a shift of delivery: literacy is if anything enhanced.
3. as above
1 and 2 are boilerplate. What’s interesting though is 3. which just pops up as it routinely does in these pieces. All evidence from neurology and evolutionary psychology, the careful arguments of people like Walter Ong – all the evidence, that is, which shows that for rational beings, language is both unique and essential is lost on these people. Maybe because the serious discussion takes place in books.
. . . says a BBC news headline, one of many that makes one wish Paul Jennings were still with us.
Feb 022008
“[Adrienne] Rich is demanding without being deliberately obtuse” says a reviewer, and in The New Statesman no less. Another simple confusion, increasingly common, that’s about to change our language spontaneously.
Jan 232008
About 2,700 residents have already been evacuated from their homes as water inundated the town.
The Nogoa River runs through the centre of Emerald and broke its banks yesterday.
But Jason Cameron from Emergency Management Queensland says indicators show the levels have been steady most of the evening.
“Everything’s going very well,” he said.
Jan 202008
With the row over the second cricket Test against India just over, you may like to know that in gridiron, according to a bloke on the ABC’s ‘Grandstand’, there’s a rule against getting stuck into the opposition with word and gesture. ‘Taunting’ is banned, and not only direct attack but also celebrating your own achievements in a way that implicitly insults the other team. No taunting in other words, and no flaunting. Who knew gridiron was such a gentlemanly pastime?
Time to mobilise ‘fleer’ and ‘jeer’. To fleer, according to SOED is to gibe, jeer, sneer at, laugh at mockingly or scornfully. Sounds like the slips cordon to me. ‘Sledging’ may be a fine, robust word but it tends to suggest a practice exempted from civility. So how about a sign on the dressing-room wall? ‘Players will refrain from taunts, flaunts, fleers and jeers.’
Well something’s gotta shut the bludgers up.