Important news this week from the national environmental safety agency, Geoscience Australia (GA) with the release of its updated report on the likelihood of a tsunami hitting Australia in the near future, where such a tidal wave might come ashore and how we as a nation could deal with it.
Ever keen to have their well worthwhile work noticed for coverage in busy media newsrooms, the canny communicators at GA delved into their inventory of wisdom and wit and conjured up a cunningly clever attention-grabbing headline worthy of sharing with our army of PS-sssst!ophiles.
“A new wave of tsunami hazard data” was the witty way the Agency grabbed attention and good on them for doing so.
At least it worked at PS News!
Our only fear is well be ‘flooded’ with a deluge of tsunami-isms.
Name game
To the Australian Capital Territory now where the local Government has opened nominations for the capital’s ‘Women’s Awards’ to honour women who make outstanding contributions to the lives of other women and girls in the Territory.
The Minister for Women (herself a woman) said the awards were a way of saying ‘thank you’ for the excellent work done by women across Canberra.
She said they provided an opportunity to honour and acknowledge Canberra women who were “going beyond the norm” and doing extraordinary things.
Far be it from the pedants at PS-sssst! to be pedantic, but would it not be more gender-correct for the awards to go “beyond the Norma” than its masculinely less adequate ‘norm’?
Adverbs subtracted
Staying with the ACT Women’s Awards, the official announcement raises another morsel of pedagogic preoccupation for the proselytes of PS-sssst!, that of the ‘adverbial intrusion’.
Assuring nominators that their nominees will be ennobled with numerous honours and ornamentations, the ACT Minister panel-beated the language into submission by declaring that “Winners will be automatically included in the ACT Women’s Honour Roll….”.
By slotting the adverb ‘automatically’ between the words of the stand-alone statement ‘be included’, the Minister has automatically created her own version of a dreaded ‘adverbial intrusion’, adding little to the clearer, more dramatic albeit equally meaningful, “Winners will automatically be included ….”
Maybe it’s the Minister’s intention to cunningly attract more interest to the awards!
Only a blatantly split infinitive would be more noticeable.
What the doctor ordered
To Rama Gaind’s weekly giveaway now in which two lucky readers stand the chance of winning copies of the inspirational book covering the life and times of an outback doctor, Active Labour: Memoirs of a Working-Class Doctor by Percy Rogers.
To get among the winners, all you needed to know was the name of the doctor who revelled in the memoirs, which, of course was ‘Percy Rogers’.
And the two observant readers whose correct entries left the PS News Barrel of Booty first were those from David G of the Federal Department of Human Services and Lauren M from the Queensland Department of Health.
Congratulations to David and Lauren and thanks to all who took part. The prize books will be wining their way to their new homes soon.
For another chance to join Rama’s long line of winners, simply follow this link to this week’s giveaway and give it your nest shot.
You have to be in it to win it and being ‘in it’ is free.
Good luck!
Lesson more
And finally, a lesson on how times have changed was learned at PS-sssst! this week with our traditionally popular work-fun balance competitions encountering an unexpected brick wall after years of knocking them down.
Perhaps it had to happen eventually but Rama Gaind’s free book giveaway attracted more than 30 times the entries last week’s ‘Red hot grammar’ competition did, despite both offering fabulous books as their prizes.
Admittedly, pondering over the plural correctness of ‘Director-Generals’ or ‘Directors-General’ is not everyone’s idea of intellectual amusement, but similar obscurities have attracted strong and robust interest in the past.
Maybe they’ve all retired!
Speaking of retirement, PS-sssst! will be back next week.
Till then…….
