Dons

The Australian (a fiesty broadsheet newspaper here in, of course, Australia) has been running a hysterical campaign to discredit Ishmael Beah, the author of "A long way gone". It's a disturbing and reasonably well-written book about Mr Beah's time as a child soldier in the civil wars in Sierra Leone, or maybe not as the case may be. I read it and liked it.

The Australian sometimes goes way overboard on one of its favorite causes, and for regular readers (like me) it can be quite good fun to tease out the manic foaming-at-the-mouth coverage on something - their campaign against Outcomes-Based Education in WA from last year was a classic of its kind; barely a week went by without one of their commentators getting stuck in.

They've got a real bee in their bonnet about Mr Beah. First, there was an interesting article about some factual problems with the book - fair enough. I tend to take memoirs with a grain of salt anyway, and part of me is glad when this stuff is tested and found wanting. But in this case they kept going after him like he was a Western Australian education department bureaucrat and it stopped being interesting or funny.

Today's contribution was this: Beah's Memoir to be Examined by Dons. The gist of it is that the book was chosen by the Multnomah County (Portland, Oregon) Library for the city's annual "Everybody Reads festival", and that as part of that the authenticity of the book, among other things, will be part of two roundtable discussions with local scholars. One of those scholars is, apparently, Portland State University literature professor and noted poet Primus St John.

So far so good, although you have to say if this is far as the scandal has gotten they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. So why am I whingeing about this? (A blog being either a boast or a whinge, of course.)

It's the word "don". Bear in mind this is someone writing about American academics in an Australian newspaper. Don is a particularly English word. You occassionally see "boffin" in australian newspapers and it always grates, I always think it's journalists who've spent some time in London and just can't let go, but "Don" is much worse. We just don't say that here! And I don't think even English people would say it about academics from Portland State; it's an Oxbridge thing.

And yes, before you tell me, I know I do need to get out more.