Usually the pond likes a quiet Sunday meditation, traditional in form, begun by Polonius ranting about the ABC, with a bonus to wash it all down,but there's a lot to pack in this day ...
Will it be safe? you might ask ...
Christian Szell: Is it safe?... Is it safe?
Babe: You're talking to me?
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Is what safe?
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.
Babe: You're talking to me?
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Is what safe?
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.
Ah, the noisy kettle ...
All things considered, and the pond doesn't mind the show, and occasionally drops in on Ira Glass and This American Life, the notion that NPR ever had an audience that reflected America is an astonishing delusion, of the sort that only an NPR loon could contemplate.
The notion reminded the pond of the days when the pond faithfully reported on the * figures achieved by RN in the ratings.
Even back in 2017 when NPR was boasting about ratings being at an all-time high, the weekly total was about 37.4 million, and if you divide that by seven you barely get above 7 million daily, in a population of some 330 million. Even the pond, with its limited knowledge of American culinary matters, knows that you can find cartoons with the punchline "after listening to NPR, this jelly donut tastes more like multi-grain bagle".
Don't get the pond wrong, the pond isn't interested in travelling the road much frequented by the noise machine, and prefers the quiet eddies ... which is why the pond could roll jaffas down the aisle at the notion that the United States is the sort of town where an open-minded, curious culture prevailed and anxious to tune into NPR and subscribe and hear all about it...
But every broadcaster must have its useful idiot, eagerly seized on by those absolutely not interested in being open-minded or remotely curious, and so Berliner was the useless idiot this day for Polonius ... and once this Berliner (not the jam doughnut) was exhausted, it would inevitably be the ABC's turn, as it always is ...
Reading Polonius always reminds the pond of an unfathomable gulf, or perhaps two loons relying on the self-driving feature in a Tesla ...(Polonius is in the vehicle on the far right)
For the love of the long absent lord, if the ABC irritates you so much, pluck it out, and keep the one eye you use on a daily basis, it won't stop you pretending you're a dog, like those bloody furries ruining us all ...
Continuing in the vein of a quiet Sunday meditation, the pond decided to lift Dame Slap's red card, because the poor thing, perhaps realising she's gone too far, made a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, by doing a Seinfeld, producing an abject effort about nothing much in particular ...
For that she apologises?
The pond is still waiting for an apology for her doing the dance with Lord Monckton and the like, and donning a MAGA cap and slipping out into the New York night to celebrate the arrival of her orange Jesus:
Not to mention the many apologies due for the Lehrmann matter and just about everything else she's written for the lizard Oz.
Meanwhile, she seems to have wandered down from Planet Janet above the faraway tree to pose as a serious commentator on matters cultural:
Dear sweet long absent lord, there seems to be no reason to involve Strunk and White in this pathetic whitewash, an idle attempt to sound whimsical and refined, as if anyone munching on a dinkum pie cared for y'artz.
Shouldn't her style guide be online, where her orange Jesus trumpets the news in caps?
The pond happened to track the source to here ...
Is there no one she won't attempt to involve in her shame? What next, who next, Patrick White? (Yes, Who's on first base, so White must do instead of What on second).
The pond's suggestion? Should have stuck with the law and joined other great minds ...
That tragic attempt by Dame Slap that she still belonged to the civilised world left the pond feeling frisky and up to acknowledging that the ululating Uhlmann had done his first Inquiring mind routine for the reptiles (before this he'd had a go at former Chairman Rudd, Bob Carr, free speech, and China's invisible cyber invasion, which was an astonishing EXCLUSIVE).
Attention should be paid to yet another reptile shouting at China ...
The pond's advice? Pray on it, pray loud and long and hard ...
The pond will pause to note one remarkable thing, about the only thing remarkable in this piece of tired hackery.
Almost every reptile story contains links that keep readers within the hive mind. Click on them and you land on another spot in the lizard Oz.
For some reason, the ululating Uhlmann is able to link outside the paywall, and never mind how many readers might wander off into the vast full to overflowing intertubes, never to be seen again when they realise there's a whole other world out there.
Not that the links were in any way compelling or worth abandoning screen caps for, but weird and wonderful all the same...
It's delightful when reptiles release that China is a one party dictatorship. The pond is more interested in the master wagging the reptile tales, as in this yarn ....
That's more like it, the randy old goat in his dotage and still in the legal wars ... cry vengeance for. doting Harry, little England and St George. At least now we know what we're fighting for when we bung on that war with China by Xmas ...
We're living in a mental gulag, cries the boy who's slotted himself into the hive mind like he's encased in bubble wrap?
Hush, he's probably sublimely unaware of the assorted illegalities, criminalities and tax evading skills of the corporation he's now working for, and best leave him in that state of bliss.
At this point, some can hear readers sobbing.
For this the pond gave up its usual serve of nattering "Ned"? This was just a molehill of the bleeding obvious, with a pretend contrarian toeing the reptile line, and doing his best to keep the digital rivers of gold flowing to the chairman emeritus's next wedding and court case.
What of "Ned?
Well it would be too much to add in "Ned", the pond is already well over time, and full as a goog with y'artz and a fear of China, but mindful that there are a few masochists who love to test themselves with an Everest "Ned" climb, the pond has kicked the pompous, portentous endless quoter of others to a special late arvo slot.
No complaining, there's no reason to go there if you'd rather be doing almost anything else, with nail cleaning and nose picking high on the list ... and now to end with a 'toon designed to take the mind off all of the above, with a special guest appearance by the mouse from that house ...
A good place for Uhlmann to be employed another mad catholic preaching right wing bullshit.
ReplyDeleteAnother view on Strunk & White: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html
ReplyDeleteA very funny link Anon, though perhaps the writer was a tad opaque in his opinion ...
DeleteI believe the success of Elements to be one of the worst things to have happened to English language education in America in the past century. The book's style advice, largely vapid and obvious ("Do not overwrite"; "Be clear"), may do little damage; but the numerous statements about grammatical correctness are actually harmful. They are riddled with inaccuracies, uninformed by evidence, and marred by bungled analysis. Elements is a dogmatic bookful of bad usage advice, and the people who rely on it have no idea how badly off-beam its grammatical claims are. In this essay I provide some illustrations, and a review of some of the book's most striking faults...
And so on and finally the pond achieved enlightenment and understood what had happened to Dame Slap.
However, it got even better ...
Conceivably Strunk was trying to inculcate in everyone the habit of writing like Henry James and not like Mark Twain (not the best advice for every context, surely!). But whatever his motives, telling people that good writing never uses however to introduce a clause is simply untruthful.
Then came a truly unique moment which the pond enjoyed immensely ...
White's assumption that his idiosyncratic prejudices about individual words or constructions should be laws for everyone to live by, no matter how odd and peculiar to White they might be, strikes me as a peculiar kind of vanity. If he dislikes, say, degree adjuncts qualifying the word unique, he just adds to the book (2000, p. 62) a stipulation that it is a mistake. (Strunk made no such claim.) If it's unpleasant for him, it's an error for you. He will simply bully you into agreement...
And then there was the conclusion which the pond thought a tad political ...
There is more to be said against The Elements of Style — much more than I have space for. All I hope to have done here is to begin to flesh out my judgment that Elements is a hopeless guide to English usage and has been deleterious to grammar education in America.
I do not think the issue is trivial. The Elements of Style does real and permanent harm. It encourages the waste of precious resources — time spent by teachers, students, and copy editors; money spent by English departments and publishers. Genuine faults in writing go neglected because time is spent on nonsense like which-hunting. And worse than that, sensible adults are wrongly persuaded that their grasp of their native tongue is imperfect and their writing is incorrect. No good purpose is served by damaging people's self-confidence in this way.
I am no defender of the species that White once scornfully called "the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow" (Guth 2006, 416); I have no time for sloppy or ungrammatical writing. But I object to the time that is wasted in trying to teach students falsehoods about English grammar. And I think this is a linguistic issue of unusually large practical importance. Linguists should not be shy about condemning all the harm that this opinionated, influential, error-stuffed, time-wasting, unkillable zombie of a book has done.
Great fun, ta ...
I've never minded too much about adjuncts' qualifying "unique"; for instance, I just take, say, "nearly unique" to be a simple vernacular way of saying "maybe not many more than one" - it's shorter and simpler.
DeletePolonius: "Could it be that ABC television's 7.30 presenter Sarah Ferguson has two personas ?" And could it be that Polonius has none ? On and on and on, as DP notes, about the ABC and none of it worth a pinch of malodorous excrement.
ReplyDeleteAnd as to his comment on Sarah's closing remark, what kind of "right of reply" is called for on that ? Other than maybe "ok" which we can take for granted under the cicumstances. So does Sarah 'impersonate' the 7.30 report ? It would be kind of strange if she was both the 7.30 report and also her own different self all in the same session, wouldn't it. Like Sarah saying "I'm going to interact with you as though I represent the 7.30 report and all the people involved in producing it" when how could it be otherwise ?
Oh well, just another week of righteousness from Polonius and his furry.
So, Slappy about Strunk and White: "This book should be handed out to every student in year 8 to help stem the tide of unedited writing and unedited thinking." What a pity that nobody performed this vital service for Dame Slap then. But she would never have had her journalistic 'career' if she'd been able to intelligently, and intelligibly, and edit her thinking. Then she might have wasted less of her reader's time on silly little girl character assassinations - like on poor Harry, who, Polonius notwithstanding, has never been given a "right of reply".
ReplyDeleteOnwards, ever: "I think of Strunk and White often." Sure, think then ignore. "Like last weekend when Taylor Swift released 30 new songs too. I love the girl but it's just too much Taylor." So what happened ? Did Slappy sit through the whole 30 songs in a single, unbroken session ? Well yes, I guess she is the kind of ningless nong that couldn't work through the 30 songs a few at a time. She's still just a scatterbrained 12yo, isn't she.
So the Dame Slap tells us she was introduced to Strunk and White something like 20 years ago. As too many wreptile writers go on to write - everyone should be required to read this. Seems no friend pointed her towards George Orwell's 1946 'Politics and the English Language'. Very likely, she, and her friends, were given to slipping 'Orwellian' into their texts, without feeling any need to read what that author wrote. The actual year 1984 had come and gone. Many marked that by going to the film, rather than reading the book.
DeleteOrwell's essay is much shorter than the Strunk and White book (14 standard Penguin pages, all still entertaining), and, if that is too much - it includes his six rules, which easily stand alone. They have been pinned beside the keyboard of my desktop since I set up a Commodore 64 as word processor, around 40 years ago.
They are -
1 Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2 Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3 If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4 Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5 Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6 Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Our Dame might have benefited from having that 6th rule before her - it was Orwell's particular contribution to 'rules of style' - which I have not encountered in the other books and articles that I have looked at.
Yair, but I'd say that now a very great many "scientific words" are "everyday English". When did "gravity" get its modern physics meaning ? Is the word "influenza" a scientific word or an everyday English word ?
DeleteGB - interesting that you choose 'influenza' as an example, given that too many people who have one or other of the 'common' colds say they have 'the flu'. When TV news is trying to raise awareness of true influenza, they offer file shots of people sneezing - which further confuses understanding of what might indicate 'flu' and what is more characteristic of common cold.
DeleteAh well the word interests me, Chad: it's very short for a 4 syllable word, but it's still commonly abbreviated to 'flu'. It's also kinda 'science like' even though it actually originates from medieval Latin ('influentia' meaning influence).
DeleteSo just a fine example of an 'everyday word' of English, I think. After all, many scientific words do originate from Latin in one way or another. Such as 'gravity' from the Latin gravitatem (gravitas) meaning "weight, heaviness, pressure".
Another "scatterbrained 12yo" bothsider I'd all but forgotten about. No wonder. Who said this today in the ungaurdian?
ReplyDelete"So, you know, maybe it’s a reframing,” she said. “But nonetheless, some type of independent commission to inquire to test and push the boundaries, to try to have that overarching regulation.”
"Amid the threat of big tech, Greens senator says News titles are ‘trusted news providers’ and a royal commission should look at the whole industry".
"The senator described a scenario in which a conspiracy theory could be spreading via a social media platform but its owner blocks users from sharing factual, countervailing information from “trusted news providers like the Guardian, like the ABC, like the Murdoch press – like the local newspaper in a small rural town”.
"Questioned about her change of tune on News Corp, she said there were “some decent journalists” at the company “who do good work”.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/apr/27/sarah-hanson-young-softens-demand-for-inquiry-into-murdoch-media
Where are my antiemetics! Ahhh...
1) make socials and search fall under journo ethics
2) news, search and socials to hand over % revenue based on ROE in country
3) RC into political donations
4) Sack SHY
Memories!
Anonymous
Dec 10, 2015, 1:21:00 PM
"Leaders like Di Natale, Bandt and Hansen-Young. Their double standards are breath taking."
https://loonpond.blogspot.com/2015/12/in-which-pond-honours-its-politician-of.html?showComment=1449714073603&m=1#c1954754990487879646
The sullied Uhlmann: China's "...fishing fleet of more than half a million vessels is stripping the oceans bare..." Wau, so more than 500,000 Chinese ocean-going fishing vessels. So where do they spend their time and why is there any fish still swimming in the oceans ?
ReplyDeleteI wonder who did the counting and how they did it, and then came to such an accurate count as reported by Yale: "Estimates of the total size of China’s global fishing fleet vary widely. By some calculations, China has anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 fishing boats, accounting for nearly half of the world’s fishing activity." Well there we go, who could doubt the correctness of Yale, especially when there's such a small difference between 200,000 and 800,000:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-chinas-expanding-fishing-fleet-is-depleting-worlds-oceans
Hmm - I wonder who we could say this of:
ReplyDelete"Unlearning is a lot harder than learning. The things we need to unlearn are often things we'd deny believing, but somehow we still do, as they've burrowed into our consciousness like some "fact" we were told when we were 5 and are almost incapable of disbelieving."
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/04/unlearning.html
Incidentally, JM, the thing about the Melbourne Demons setting up in the USA. I think that sort of thing is actually happening and that now with jetliners able to travel from almost anywhere to anywhere in a single, non-stop flight, more of it will happen.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, once upon a time the idea that New Zealand teams could compete in 'Australia' competition leagues would have been fanciful, but now it's commonplace.
And I just think how close Australia is to India, China and Indonesia: the 1st, second and 4th most populated countries in the world. And we have getting near to a million India born Indians and only a few thousand fewer China born Chinese as Australian citizens, they'd have ready-made supporter groups.
Maybe Australia-India cricket teams might be the start.