fight or tea?

I was at a presentation the other day about the inside workings of politics and the public service, and the presenter said of a particular politician that 'he would rather have a cup of tea than a fight', and of course this was meant as a bad thing. I absolutely love this, and I've taken it to heart. It's part of the new manliness thing.

Chainsaw/whilst

There was a truly fabulous headine in today's Age (online edition, it may not have made it into the physical paper).

"Police disarm man with chainsaw."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/police-disarm-man-with-chainsaw/2007/02/20/1171733718704.html

On a completely unrelated note, I was reading something today and was reminded how much I dislike it when Australians write 'whilst' instead of 'while'. Our English chums do it, but I can almost excuse them for doing it, as they also say 'whilst'. But I don't think it's at all common in spoken Australian english, and there's absolutely no excuse for it here.

My favorite sentence

I'm sure you can't sleep for wondering what my favorite sentence is. Let me put you out of your misery. It's from Mr Phillips, by John Lanchester. And here it is. Our narrator - Mr Phillips, as you might expect - is talking about his secretary, Karen:

"And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her 'Yeah'"

Oh, and I can't resit an update on La Hutton. On the welcoming video, the one with the animatronic dinosaurs, she at one point uses the word 'advantage'. But what made me sit bolt upright in my chair was the way she said it. Not with the 'ah' sound you'd expect from a glossy sydney demi-celebrity. She used the short flat 'a' (as in 'cat') that you'd expect from someone brought up in middle-class Melbourne (as opposed to what passes for upper-class melbourne, or even catholic melbourne for that matter).

Many years ago, in the midtown Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, I stumbled across a book about regional variants in Australian spoken english. It was a short book, as you'd expect, the authors rapidly reaching the conclusion that most australian accents fall either side or the class divide or the urban/rural divide, but they did some work on the 'a' vs 'ah'. There was a map, shaded by relative densities of the two variants. Sydney was more 'ah', Melbourne more 'a', as you'd expect. Adelaide was off the scale 'ah' - no surprise there, they also say 'anythink' there a lot. I can't remember the Queensland data, they probably all spoke too slowly to be of any statistical significance.

I wonder sometimes whether the committee who chose the national anthem ('Advahnce Australia Fair' most of the time at public events) did this deliberately.

Must sleep.

Haggard

Today's NY Times there's a great story about the Rev Ted Haggard that is just stuffed full of interesting tidbits. Even the headline's good "Haggard pronounced 'completely heterosexual'". But there's more. Not just the fact that he claims it was just the once - that apart from that one male prostitute in the motel room he'd never done anything. Not even that he claims that even though he bought meth he didn't actually use it. We already knew that.

What I loved about today's story is that he and his wife (who I expect will keep an especially close eye on him now) are going to live in either Missouri or Iowa, and they are both going to study for masters degrees in psychology. But the key fun fact that the Times didn't put in their story is that the Haggards are going to study online. I don't know why this amuses me so much, it probably shouldn't.

I found it in Slate, which had another gem a while ago. When Haggard emailed the members of his church after the scandal first broke, he said "The accusations ... against me are not all true, but enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry". (My italics, of course.)

Isn't that fabulous?