A warm welcome back to work for many of PS News’s hard working workers lucky enough to work up a few hard-earned weeks off.
Opening up in a brand new decade, the newsfront so far has been working overtime with bushfires on fire all over the country and public service personnel rising to the task as usual, stepping up when the hard yards are ahead.
But, as for the past 14 years, PS News returns regrouped recouped and renewed to return to serving the many Services who service the Australian (and these days New Zealand) communities.
And as is customary at this time of year, PS News and its little brother PS-sssst! wishes all our readers the heartiest, happiest and most harmonious New Year ahead.
And so say all of us!
Tortured talk
One notably knowledgeable interpreter of all things linguistic – the Plain English Foundation – published its ‘Worst Words of the Year’ list over the holiday period, exposing the more serious maltreatments and molestations inflicted on our long suffering native tongue in 2019.
High on the Foundation’s list of grievous disfigurement was the anonymous police force that renamed an officer’s unruly punch at a protester as a much less serious ‘palm strike’; the US Department of Energy’s renaming of natural gas as “freedom gas” so it can sell it to other countries; and the gradually sinking Sydney apartment block that was judged by an engineer to be simply ‘moving in a downward motion.
Other examples of literary whitewash include the law-breaking bank that claimed its processes were merely ‘not aligned to legislative requirements’ and the car company that described its redundant workers as going through a ‘voluntary employee separation’.
There ought to be awards for this level of quality conspiracies.
Monopoly on competition
Still dabbling in confusion but on a different battleground, some sort of prize might also be available to the holiday-time radio commentators discussing the virtues of competition in the economy, but ending up running their logic somewhat off the rails.
The otherwise sensible discussion concluded that the highly regarded national Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) was threatening its very own central doctrine by holding a monopoly on its own activities.
“How can it really impose competition in the economy,” the commentators argued seriously, “if it doesn’t have any competition itself?”
Perhaps it’s the art of radio commentary that could benefit from extra competition!
Credit:Alexander Mikhailov
And finally, full marks for the wise-to-a-fault pedant who took the adventurer to task for suggesting that a parachute was essential equipment for anyone who wanted to go skydiving.
“It is not” argued the pedant wholeheartedly.
“He or she only needs a parachute to skydive twice.”
He’s right, of course!
Till next week……
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