Always keen to draw attention to smart, sharp, shrewd and slick anagrams PS-sssst! is delighted to report that the past week was awash with them.
High under the spotlight was the Western Australian Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries assurance to school-going families that a program promoting reconciliation projects with the State’s Aboriginal communities would be returning to schools bigger and better next year.
“Schools across Western Australia will continue to create projects next year that promote and advance reconciliation in their local community through the Partnership, Acceptance, Learning and Sharing (PALS) program,” the Department proclaimed joyfully.
It said a Project Toolkit had been developed to assist educators and schools plan and develop their own PALS projects.
While PS-sssst! congratulates the Department on its PALS initiative, it recalls from its own school days that great care must be taken when creating anagrams – especially the clever, cunning and crafty ones such as PALS – if they’re to be used and respected by ever ingenious and inventive schoolkids.
The abbreviation of ‘Partnership, Acceptance, Learning and Sharing’ might look cleverly creative as PALS but its close relative ‘Sharing, Learning, Acceptance and Partnerships’ looks far less attractive as SLAP; its other rellie ‘Acceptance, Learning, Partnership and Sharing’ appears mountainous as ALPS; and its energetic cousin ‘Learning, Acceptance, Partnership and Sharing’ active as LAPS.
A rare case perhaps to ask the question: why use four words when five will do!
Cycle paths
Still enjoying the view from anagram city,
PS-sssst! visits NSW now where a project has just been completed evaluating the safety of motorbike helmets to ensure they’ll do what’s expected of them in the case of an accident.
Reporting on the findings of a part-public/part-private consortium that put the helmets through their paces, the local Minister said its findings would allow the State to rate the helmets during Motorcycle Awareness Month, which just happens to be this October.
And just in case any member of the public was unaware that motorbike riding was a frowned upon pastime, the Minister happily announced that the consortium’s research project rejoiced under the name ‘Consumer Rating and Assessment of Safety Helmets’, unashamedly anagrammated as CRASH.
How positive!
Such positivity has prompted PS-sssst! to reach into the depths of its own creativity to offer an equally conclusive anagram for the helmet testing process, if a little more direct.
PS-sssst!’s suggestion: ‘Delightfully Evaluated Alarm-Tested Helmets’.
After all, where there’s a CRASH there’s (often) a DEATH!
Licence to spell
Following up to last week’s literary licentiousness now when we loitered around the lawfully legal spelling or otherwise of the lamentably labyrinthine word ‘licence’, also tagged ‘license’.
Having established that one of them is a noun and the other a verb, their literary likeliness often has them mistaken for one another.
Undaunted by the possibility of unsound usage however, Victoria’s fearless Minister for Roads and Road Safety took the pair head-on to announce that learner driver permits and driver licence tests would soon to be restored in his State.
“Learner permit and licence testing including drive tests are set to resume across regional Victoria in line with the Government’s roadmap to reopening,” the Minister declared naively.
“Licencing operations will resume in regional areas,” he said bravely before suffering a touch of discombobulation with “5,000 licensing appointments postponed across regional Victoria.”
One licencing has a ‘C’ and the next one has an ‘S’.
Oh to be an American, where a licence is a license, however it’s used.
Barbarian giveaway
Giveaway time on PS-sssst! now with the redoubtable Rama Gaind loosening the PS News trove of treasure to offer DVDs of the epic film Waiting For The Barbarians starring Johnny Depp and Mark Rylance.
The DVDs go to the first three readers who have successfully answered Rama’s querulous quiz question by naming the actor in the film who plays the assisting officer to Depp’s Colonel Joll.
The correct answer is Robert Pattinson and the first three correct entries to emerge from the PS News Barrel of Booty came from Veronica B of the Federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment in Canberra, Mark S from the same Department (coincidence…!) but in Sydney, and Kerstin W from the national Department of Social Services.
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone for taking part. The DVDs will be on their way to their new owners very soon.
In the meantime, for another chance to join Rama’s Army of winners simply give your luck an airing on her current DVD giveaway at this PS News link and her also-prize DVD at this link.
Good luck to all who do.
Going to waters
And finally, a quick visit to the world of Aptonym in which only people with ‘apt’ names are chosen for ‘app’-ropriate’ jobs.
Alerting the populace of Western Australia that the Bureau of Meteorology has predicted damaging cyclones for the northern half of the State in the coming summer, the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services issued a warning to residents and travellers to take great care.
“The wet season can bring a lot of rain,” the Department’s spokesman said
“People travelling inland should also take note of potential flooding risks,” he said.
And who better to deliver such a wet and watery warning than the Department’s Deputy Commissioner Operations, a man ideally named for the task: Craig Waters!
Till next week….
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