Reverse engineering the thesaurus.

This report is about technically correct yet poor English which should have been rooted out in school. So ultimate blame for the following rests with the Education Department.

This SMH article says

"Mr Penman has denied the claim and is pondering legal action of his own..."

Pondering? Hmmm, yes and no, but mainly no.

It appears that the thesaurus chose this word, like a very subtle reminder of that Friends episode where Joey uses a thesaurus to translate "They're warm, nice people with big hearts" into "They're humid, pre-possessing homosapiens with full-sized aortic pumps". This isn't exactly how 'pondering' should be used either.

If I reverse engineer "pondering" using my own thesaurus there are many more suitable alternatives for a weighty issue such as legal action, such as "considering", "contemplating", "deliberating" or even "thinking about".

For fluffier issues such as what colour to paint the wall, "pondering" is indeed a reasonable choice, along with "wondering", "mulling", "musing" and the universal "thinking about".

English needs to change with the times and adapt, and our professional media lead this, but this fancy word just made it hard to read and is thus

The article that shouldn't have been at all.

This article on The Advertiser's "Adelaide Now" site has 107 words which should never have been published.

The whole article is a shocker as it reports "A PERSON has been struck down and killed by a train at Bowden...TransAdelaide later said it believed the death to be suicide"... err, which is when the entire article should have been deleted (or a seriously new angle found).

It was published at 9.45pm, possibly from a mobile device as there is a spelling error, so I guess this won't appear in the print edition tomorrow. Let's see.

This is a definite


UPDATE:
This article appeared in the following day's print edition but without mention of a suicide.
Meanwhile on the website, by next morning the comments section had been removed.

Rewritten but not deleted.

This wasn't the type of error I had in mind when I started this blog, but it's a simple editing error which, if computers can't spot it, at least a human could (or vice versa).

In this article about two boats, this paragraph:

Their boat, carrying more than 250 ethnic Tamils, was intercepted last weekend by the Indonesian navy en route to Australia and taken to the Javanese city of Merak.

was followed closely by this paragraph:

The boat had been intercepted by the Indonesian navy en route to Australia and taken to the Javanese port city of Merak.

One would guess that the 2nd paragraph was copied-and-pasted then rewritten as the first and someone forgot to delete the original, as the repeated words highlighted in bold make up over 80% of the 2nd paragraph.

Could happen to anyone on a deadline - so it's

October Record!

This is another heartbeat update as we pass the halfway mark of October, to report that I haven't found ANY grammatical errors in the Australian media whatsoever this month! Not a single one! This is fantastic!

I know I wasn't dreaming all those errors in the past, but I feel that I've awoken to a new day of easy and pleasurable reading.

So in this case, an empty blog is a good blog!