Words

Archived Posts from this Category

Mon 7 Apr 2008

Extra!

Posted by anaglyph under In The News, Words
[14] Comments

You may recall that some little while ago I talked about Stupid News Speak – the way in which the news media mangles the English language for their own unfathomable ends.

Well, this recent discussion about wild weather reminded me of another curious phenomenon in the world of news linguistics – the circumstance of The Anachronistic Word.

This is when a word that would otherwise have been relegated to the Old People’s Home of language is artificially kept alive like some kind of etymological zombie to do the bidding of semi-literate journalists. For example, consider the word chiefly. Who uses chiefly except news weathermen?

The West will see some rain, chiefly on the ranges…

And, when does anything wreak havoc except in the news description of a tornado or mob of unhappy student protesters?

In the world of news, a person does not fall to their death. No way José! They plummet. Hands up who’s used the word plummet in conversation in the last decade?

But my favourite must surely be the way that about the only thing that is ever hampered in the modern world is rescue efforts.

There are many more of these. Your favourites?

 

Wed 19 Mar 2008

Also Sprach Zarathustra

Posted by anaglyph under In The News, Sad, Science, Words
[12] Comments

RIP Arthur C Clarke

 

Tue 11 Mar 2008

Simple Simon

Posted by anaglyph under Ephemera, In The News, Words
[12] Comments

Blow for Pies

One of the intriguing things about coming to live in a different country city is learning to converse in the manner of the locals. Now, English is a language of which I have a fairly good grasp but every now and then down here in Melbourne I hear or see something that completely floors me, such as the newspaper banner above. It was on display as I walked through Flinders St. Station in the city centre.

My brain made a sort of popping noise as I passed on down the stairs trying to make sense of it. Some kind of setback for the fastfood industry…? A cocaine racket financed by a pastry magnate…? A contest to win the Great Australian Meal with lungpower…?

I had to get a local to explain it to me.

 

Thu 10 Jan 2008

I Put a Smell On You

Posted by anaglyph under Ooky, Perfume, Signs, Words
[12] Comments

Imagine my glee when, during my Christmas expeditions to the Two Dollar Shop (as mentioned previously), I stumbled upon an eau de parfum! In a Two Dollar Shop! Smack me with a sockfull of wet lavender pulp! It wasn’t actually two dollars, coming in at a whopping five bucks, but, dear Acowlytes, this, by Two Dollar Shop standards, is a Luxury Item!

And, in true Two Dollar Shop fashion, this bottle of perfume is just like something in the real world only cheaper, crappier and made from toxic chemicals left over from industrial manufacturing processes.

Cowmrades! I present for your delectation: Bane eau de parfum.

A Bottle o' Bane

This is the Dictionary.com definition of ‘bane’:

    bane [beyn]
    –noun
    1. a person or thing that ruins or spoils

One imagines that this sense of the word is not what the creators of Bane have intended and they are in fact hoping to evoke a secondary meaning somewhat akin to spell or poison. Thus is the peril of attempting to be poetic in a language that is not the one with which you are familiar.

Of course, who am I to say? Going by the smell of the stuff, maybe the first definition is really what they had in mind. But more of that in due course.

A Box o' Bane

The Bane packaging is a triumph of product-design tragedy. The designer could only be said to have been successful if the brief went something like this:

Hey Adelheld!* What we’re going for with this is some kind of a half-woman/half-cobra embedded in a rock and obscured by a curtain. It should be really difficult to make out exactly what it is. Oh, and if you can save us some money by, say, using up some old tubes of paint you’ve got lying around – you know, those murky bilious greens that you’ve had sitting in a bottom drawer for a few years – that would be great!

Of course, the whole thing is nicely set off by the gold foil text that just screams tacky! glamour!

Which leads me to the next exciting feature of Bane. A shiny gold button on the box lets us know that this is not just any old Bane. No sirree!

New Improved Bane

This is New Improved Bane. It is at this point that I wish The Cow was scratch ‘n’ sniff because in all truth that’s the only way I could convey to you the full magnitude of the claim of ‘New Improved’. My God. New Improved Bane smells like a blend of cough medicine, window cleaner and those deodorant lozenges they put in men’s urinals. I shudder to think of what it was like before they improved it. Then again, being generous, maybe the ‘improvement’ was just in the colour? The label lists nearly a dozen colorants. Now what’s that all about? Who cares what colour the perfume is? It spends all its life in a dark red glass bottle and now and then you spray out a tiny quantity that atomizes into a virtually clear vapour. It’s madness – they could have ditched the colorants and had the product on the shelves for four bucks!

NOT Poison

Some sense can be made of the whole enterprise by examining a sticker on the cellophane packaging in which the box is shrouded. Here, the makers of Bane attempt to simultaneously align themselves with, and distance themselves from, Dior’s famous ‘Poison’ by telling us that Bane ‘compares’ to Poison but doesn’t use the same fragrances. This could be put more clearly on a label worded like this:

Dear Customer: If you lack discrimination, have no sense of smell and are a tightwad, you can buy this stuff and pretend it is Poison. It would be a fitting accompaniment to your fake Rolex, and the kinds of people you probably hang out with will never be able to tell the difference anyway.

Dear Dior Lawyer: Please don’t sue us. Even though we are attempting to trade on your reputation we are just trying to get rid of industrial fragrances left over from our disinfectant factory and only olfactorally-challenged cheapskates would think it was anything like your perfume.

Of course, I could be entirely mistaken here – the manufacturers might simply be equating Bane with rat poison. Or insecticide.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the gilded eau de parfum attribution, one could be easily forgiven for mistaking Bane for a competitively priced alternative to Mortein.

It’s just a shame that it smells so much worse.

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*I couldn’t dig up much information about Bane (or ‘The Dorall Collection’) on the net (unsurprisingly) but as near as I can make out it is manufactured in Belgium. If that’s not the case I apologize profusely to all Belgians for the slight.

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Thu 13 Dec 2007

Tautology?

Posted by anaglyph under Religion, Signs, Words
[6] Comments

Christian Fiction

Where they keep the Good Books.

(Spotted by jmf in his local book store.)

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Hey CowPokes!! Don’t Forget: the Christmas Competition is still running! Be sure to get yer entry in!

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Sun 9 Dec 2007

Almond Robbery

Posted by anaglyph under Food & Drink, Silly, Words
[9] Comments

It has been noted that to make The Reverend a very happy man, all one has to do is sit him down with a good cup of hot tea and a slice of fruitcake. Of course, as Christmas approaches, the opportunities to offer fruitcake (in the form of Christmas cake) proliferate and the Reverend is continually on the lookout for the very best offerings.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that the highest calibre Christmas cake is always homemade. This does not mean that just because Christmas cake is homemade it is necessarily exceptional of course.

What is true is that I have yet to taste a commercially manufactured cake that is anything other than merely mediocre. Unfortunately, and in spite of numerous examples to the contrary, I continue to be ever-hopeful.

Fruitcake Label

Consider the label on this nicely presented tinned Christmas cake I bought yesterday. Pay particular attention to that phrase: Authentic homemade recipe. Now it’s quite plain what the Woolworth’s people intend to convey with this, but seriously, it’s just one GREAT BIG LIE!

First of all, before we go into the semantics, who are they kidding with the basic pitch here? There were, by my rough count, around three hundred cakes in the stack that this one came from, and I think we can assume that this wasn’t the only Woolworths’ supermarket to feature this product. So at around 800 Australian Woolworth’s stores x 300 cakes, we’re looking at display stock of 240,000 Christmas cakes.

Whose home did they make these in?!! Donald Trump’s?!!

The idea that this cake was homemade, then, is plainly preposterous. So there must be some trickery in that phrase authentic homemade recipe. You can see where I’m going here, I know. Yes, when the lawyers go before the judge in the Tetherd Cow vs Woolworth’s Christmas Cake Action of ’08 they are going to say this:

But Your Honour, it is an authentic homemade recipe. Old Mrs Woolworth did really scribble down this recipe at home. Sure, we make the cakes themselves in a fifty floor stainless-steel factory full of conveyor belts and robots and digital cherry glazers, but the recipe was authentically made at home. That’s all we claim on our product.

The defense rests.

And the cake? Well, it wasn’t bad. Desperately in need of a good dosing of brandy, and a little wimpy as far as Christmas cakes go, but passable. Not even close though, not even remotely, to the delights I used to sample every year as the judge for Kate & Annie’s annual Christmas bakeoff.

After all, homemade is where the heart is.

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Hey CowPokes!! Don’t Forget: the Christmas Competition is still running! Be sure to get yer entry in!

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