A bold error with a hidden message? Readers left wondering.

For over 24 hours already* the Sydney Morning Herald has had the following error in this article about a dispute between Cambodia and Thailand:

In Saturday's closed session, the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, baldly said Thailand had invaded his country

Assuming Hun Sen doesn't talk badly (and even if he did it wouldn't be cool to say so) and because he has a full head of hair (see picture below) the writer probably meant to say:

Hun Sen, boldly said Thailand had invaded his country

Now, if the writer really wanted to use the word 'bald', perhaps as a weird way of telling us that the 58 year old couldn't possibly have such a lush head of natural hair, then perhaps the best option would have been to write:

...a bald-faced Hun Sen, said Thailand had invaded his country

and then file the article in the celebrity section of the newspaper.

But the journalist didn't do either of those things, and even though nobody cares that's still


A picture of Hun Sen

* This means it's official as it wasn't corrected after being hastily filed, for example.

Small English cancer detected in Western Australia

This article in WA Today includes some errors which are not just annoying, but because they appear in print in Australia they actually chip away at the common English language we use.

The first which leaps out of the page is the use of "highly-risky" in this paragraph:

It is understood the man was engaging in a BASE jump, a highly-risky practise in which people engage in extreme jumps from elevated locations and then deploy a parachute before reaching land.

I've heard highly-risky a lot in some countries in Asia so it's not new to me, but it's just bad English nonetheless. That's OK for people using English as a second language in Asia - if they want to say that then go ahead - but it's just not on in an Australian newspaper.

The second error you may have noticed in the paragraph above seems quite minor: "before reaching land". Hmmm, that would be OK if the BASE jumper was, say, jumping from a boat at sea during a triathlon, but if this kind of error passes through unchallenged to the keeper it undermines our English because new Australian immigrants reading this in the paper are going to be confused or even learn the wrong thing and if enough people learn that it changes the meaning for the rest of us and English becomes less precise and clear.

So WA Today should do better as this is