Sunday 14 November 2010

Sydney Morning Herald, 13th to 14th November, 2010

Just because you're writing about Burma, there's no need to start writing as if you are Burmese and English is your second language. It's 'accept any conditions', not 'any accept conditions'. It's no good arguing; that's just how it is (it's called grammar).

And just because Lenore Taylor sheds her usual surliness and lets rip with some genuinely funny lines -

   Gillard's “speech, to the Rotary club of Adelaide, began with some folksy reminiscences about her hometown, which, she said, was about 'Mum and Dad and Uncle Frank and Auntie Glad, backyard fruit trees and Brown Hill Creek, learning to knit and learning to read'.
    It felt like she was building up to a story about evenings in a log cabin sitting by the fireplace working on her embroidery while her dad did a spot of whittling and her sister played the fiddle, but it quickly changed pace …
    The real political joke at the moment is Richo's own NSW Labor Party, which, if it was a kids sports team, you'd have to think was getting to the point where it should forfeit.
    Fifteen departures in a matter of months leaves Kristina Keneally's outfit looking like the under-8s on one of those Saturday mornings when you're two kids short, you've already brought in the second reserve and one of the youngsters you're considering fielding is on crutches."

 
- doesn't mean the sub-editors can all put their feet up and relax. Who is going to a long, long road? And what are they going to do when they get there? Or could there be a 'be' that someone couldn't be bothered to insert in the text, because it was just too much trouble, even though it is their job to get things right?

2 comments:

  1. I have a sneaking suspicion that computer spellcheckers pass this sort of thing with ease: after all, how would they know that it's unlikely, semantically or idiomatically, that anything is going to "go to a long long road".

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  2. Computer spell checkers. Don't get me started.

    ReplyDelete