Another great Oz header!

On the letters page, yesterday. They pick a letter they like, and use a blurb about it as the headline for the whole section...

"One must oppose all aspects of the modern welfare state"

I love this, for at least three reasons. 1) I love the absolutist tone to it, it's so unequivocal. Not some, or even most aspects of the modern welfare state. No! We must oppose all aspects. 2) Clumsy use of 'One', and 3) it plays so nicely to the sterotype of Australian readers. I can say that of couse because I'm one myself, but that's only because the Fairfax papers have become so excruciatingly feeble.

Transport and archaic language..?

Back to this idea about the use of archaic and not-tremendously-understandable language on public transport. I was on a Sydney ferry on the weekend (no, I didn't go to the North Shore, calm down!) and I noticed this sign... Does anyone actually use the word don anymore?

On a similar note, I notice at Sydney and Melbourne airports, when they make the announcements it's always something like 'Qantas flight 409 to Melbourne is boarding, would passengers please proceed to gate 10'. Proceed? Is the word 'go' not fancy enough for an airport?

But I think the biggest riddle of airports - especially international airports - is those announcements you get. "Urgent page for passengers Smith and Brown. Your aircraft is boarded and ready for departure. Please proceed to gate 10 immediately as your aircraft is about to depart". Which means that the passengers in question have checked in, gone thru the immigration kerfuffle and are... well... I don't know. Have they forgotten they're supposed to be flying? Busy shopping? I travel a lot, and this is waaay more common that you'd expect.

Noone says it.

Finance jounalists: noone in the financial markets ever uses the word 'greenback' when they're talking about US Dollars. We just say 'US Dollars', or more commonly, 'Dollars'.

CityRail: noone really uses the word 'alight', and I suspect the many non english-speaking tourists who visit Sydney would never have heard of it. So stop telling to wait until people have 'alighted' before we get on the train. Oh, and isn't 'alighted' just plain wrong? What is the past tense of 'alight' anyway?

No excuse

Men: there's absolutely no excuse for wearing a baseball cap when you're on an airplane.

Art vs Life: Cletus alert!

Isn't it great when life imitates art? I was in the local pizza shop chowing down with grim determination and reading the Sunday Telegraph. There was an article about battlers being forced out onto skid row by the rental crisis. There was a woman (a not entirely unattractive woman either, I had to note) who had seven children: Nikita, Montana, Cory, Jordaan, Brayden, Madissen, Drew. Cletus alert! I especially like the variant spelling of 'Madissen'.

On a similar note, my favorite thing about the Heathland/Selwood sledging incident was that the majority of the stories on it (including the AFL one) had the girl's name spelled as 'Madisan'.

Amis

I found this lovely bit in a NYT article about Kingsley and Martin Amis:

"Martin recalled not long ago: “He was always saying, ‘I think you need more sentences like “He put down his drink, got up and left the room,” ’ and I thought you needed rather fewer of them."