To: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Sent: Friday, 20 June 2003 8:18 PM

Subject: "Perspective"

Status: Acknowledged in a detailed reply by the author of the segment in question

Intriguing argument in today's (Friday June 20) Perspective: it reminds me of my own brazen retort, as a sub-editor on the XXX freshly out of XXX in the mid-seventies, that "it's a living language" whenever my chief sub queried a particularly creative use of English, usually in some headline pun...

But you can't just so gloss over the decline in language skills that is apparent in today's written and spoken media. I've given up on the Sydney Morning Herald, whose one remaining sub, one suspects, is too busy creating clever headlines; and let the 'typos' bury the linguistic clangers... (Many of the TRUE typographical mistakes, by the way, are automatically 'corrected' by the reading eye, and don't even make it to your conscious attention.)

Part of the blame must be sheeted home to those electronic spelling checkers that made readers (those erudite arbiters employed by newspapers 'Before Harris') redundant and which lead to inanities appearing even in respectable weeklies, e.g. "between the break and the accelerator" and "divisions to role the Wehrmacht back" in last week's Spectator. (I have a fond memory of one such program running on my home-brew WP system in the early 'eighties that proudly proclaimed the manual had been "Spell-checked by Inovative (sic) Software"!).

Yet more often than not I suspect that it is indeed utter ignorance about which word is which, what it means, and what its linguistic and semantic roots are... This borne out also in speech by the increasingly frequent use of 'bought' instead of 'brought' (perhaps a worthy subject for a socio-economic dissertation of itself!), e.g. "I bought it home from France"...

Mispronouncing unfamiliar words comes easy even to native speakers, but when an ABC newsreader keeps talking about 'cervycal' (as in 'cycle') cancer for the better part of a week before he's brought up to speed by his peers (probably from Life Matters) this grey ex-sub (U-Boat to his peers on the Oz, because he was the German sub) doth quietly despair...

Cheers!

NB: This missive was neither subbed nor spell-checked but typed straight into MS Notepad.