Friends who know me well know how much I am appalled by the misuse of apostrophes. The terrible disease pluroapostrophitis appears to be nearing pandemic proportions.
Occasionally the disease-causing pathogen mutates into a form whose symptoms leaves me speechless:
.
This gem is currently appearing at a (word) butchery near my home. So, who is Famou?
A while ago I railed about an irritating fashion in user service scripting. It included:
All this reminds me of a bloke I new a while ago who was running a business. He said once that he had difficulty training his staff to say, “this is Chris” on the phone instead of “Chris speaking.” He had been to a seminar or course on customer service and believed that use of the this is script clearly demonstrated to his customers that his company was more up-to-date.
I finally found out why yesterday the this is script is favoured: when you answer the phone, the person at the other end is more likely to recall the last word you said than the penultimate one. So, if I answer with “Michael speaking” the other person is less likely to get my name than if I say “this is Michael.”
I guess this makes sense but I am concerned by an implied assumption about the attention span of people who use the phone.
I am always disappointed when the unstoppable evolution of the English language moves on through bad usage rather than clever invention.
My current beef is with journalists who, looking for a different verb that describes how someone says something, use concede as a synonym for say. In an article on “male menopause” in yesterday’s Weekend Australian Magazine, Guy Allenby uses concedes twice: once correctly, and once as a misleading synonym for says.
This is the latest example of one particular poor usage that is becoming more common. In striving to be inventive, Allenby is actually making the opposite kind of contribution to the language.
It is common in everyday Australian speech to hear our country called ‘Austraya’ (an example of the slurring that is typical of Strine). I have become used to sports broadcasters also using that pronunciation.
I was surprised and disappointed to hear an ABC newsreader repeatedly saying ‘Austraya’ and ‘Austrayan’ in a radio news bulletin last night. In the early days of the ABC its announcers were BBC clones who spoke received pronunciation. Fortunately, most ABC announcers these days sound like Austalians, as they should. But pronouncing the language clearly is a largely different matter to the accent used. There should not be such sloppiness on the ABC.
No ‘Y’ mate!
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