Commenting on the effects of COVID-19 on the housing market, a real-estate executive said yesterday that she thought there’d be ‘less transactions in the sales area’. I collapsed, of course. The word ‘less’ is wrong for a start. And ‘in the sales area’ is just inflated rubbish speech. What she should have said was that there’d be ‘fewer sales’. That’s all. No more, no less. Pedant! I hear you scream. Yes, but there’s more to it than that. My best …
THE FOLLOWING article of mine was published in the ‘review’ section of The Weekend Australian in June 2018. Twenty years ago this month (June 1998) The Harvill Press in London published an English translation of a German novel that shredded the conventions of creative writing. Among many scholars and critics, its English explosion was something like a literary Big Bang. W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn lacked plot and character development. Its narrator meandered physically and intellectually, retelling unconnected …
The ABC pleads for more money. (Don’t we all?) But you’d think that its news departments, editors, and journalists would be well-enough funded to avoid the kind of fourth-rate writing in last night’s Victorian TV news. There was Tamara Oudyn reading the bulletin. I wasn’t concentrating well enough to take in the subject matter, but I did clearly hear her say that something or someone was ‘in physical proximity’ to someone or something else. (The item was probably to do …