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 …

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ON THE FIRST day of tumultuous 2020, a Serbian used the English language properly. Novak Djokovic told reporters that he had been saddened and moved – I’m paraphrasing – by the plights of Australians “affected” by bushfires. Hallelujah!! More power to his forehand. Call him Novak, and he alone, it seems, has survived the onslaught of those idiotic and lazy noun-verbalisers who use increasingly the rubbish word impacting. Why are impacted and impacting everywhere, gabbled so constantly on radio, on …

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The following piece was published in November 2019 in Fairfax Media newspapers and online.   I’ve had it with multiple. It’s a rubbish word. It says nothing. Yet it’s everywhere … in print, online and on the airwaves. We read of fans who make multiple trips to hear a band, of snakes that bite victims multiple times, and miners who’ve had multiple warnings to clean up their messes. Anywhere that people write and broadcast English, it seems, you’ll hear the …

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