Watching Gillard talk to Cassidy as I write this. As always she keeps reminding him that his first name is ‘Barry’ and seems not to know the meaning of any English verb. She used the phrase ‘cooperate very strongly’. What can this possibly mean? She says ‘as I move around the country’. How does she do this? It implies she is like God’s love, or a cyclone depression system. Move around the country. How do you do that? Fly, yes. Drive, yes. Go, yes. Move?
I will play the interview back in the next day or so and list the words and phrases — ‘we have a deep understanding of the problems that face the Australian communidy’ is one of them — she plainly uses and does not understand, as an unschooled and baffled yurt-dwelling Outer Mongolian might use them and not understand them while struggling to pronounce them in a public setting after being kidnapped, brainwashed and parachuted into Garema Place in handcuffs.
Watch this space.
Name:
The carbon tax must have hit her hairdo this morning. She’s gone a few shades darker. But not as dark as the Australian people. Her destiny is sealed. She can mangle the English language any which-way she chooses. Many have stopped listening.
Clear language conveys clear thought. Its poor use suggests sloppy thinking.
When I was 4 stone leaner than the scales currently register, I lived in the outback of South Aust.
We used to regularly shoot at night, usually rabbits, occasionally ‘roos and foxes and pigs.
For all my life I’ve tried to keep alive my interest in the natural world, and it’s long been my firm belief – too weak a phrase, my understanding that all animals are perfectly intelligent and wonderfully adapted to their environments.
However, shine a bright light into their eyes in the darkness of the night and they’re screwed.
Maybe Ms Gillard’s issues have something in common with this? She’s reputed to be quite warm and convivial and I daresay, capable of using verbs appropriately, yet she’s also criticised constantly for her poor public performances. Blinded by the lights, perhaps?
If I were your scales would I be shouting ‘get off?’
For reasons which escape me, she continues to speak as if she were a teacher, speaking to the class after the bell has gone for recess. Tony Abbott continues to speak like a furtive parish priest, telling preposterous lies with feigned sincerity. I have stopped listening to both of them
She does much better when she speaks off the cuff. Certain pat phrases bedevil our politics in general, not just Gillard. Pollyspeak, I think I have heard it called.
It is a way of saying nothing much when there really isn’t anything to say. The 24 hour news cycle demands feeding, and as Joh Bjelke used to put it so well, he “fed the chooks” so that they had something to write, knowing that if he said nothing they would make something up.
These days every leading polly issues media releases, which they fondly hope are well enough written to be used verbatim, or with a little top and tailing.
The likes of Abbott try to generate a five-second grab for the nightly news, one that can be regurgitated in 10 second promos every half hour or so.
And all the media want to do is criticise Gillard for her dress, her accent, her hair, her nose, her backside.
I expected better from Bob Ellis.
I think, Doug, it is what she says rather than the way that she says it. If there was any substance or feeling or any indication of beliefs in what she says, I do not think we would notice, or we would at least disregard, the accent, the tone, and the lecturing tone that Dee refers to.
Chifley, Calwell and the Doc , as I understand it, had less than pleasing voices and accents and they managed to get their message across.
She uses those phrases I think to chew up interview time. Better to say it in two hundred words than twenty, to reduce the count of impertinent questions.
Her mangled English and grating accent I think are fair game, especially since the intelligent use of our language is in decline and any leader in any field should not be seen to hasten it.
All here understand the meaning of the phrase “as I move around the country”.
Everyone.
Your insistence on puerile polemics such as this only aid the Conservatives.
Shame.
At core she talks the same way John Howard talked: all weak verbs, passive voice, several prophylactic steps back from her own prose. They’ll all talk this way from now on, because it works. About the only thing you can conceivably do is take a metaphorical baseball bat to the entire conversation, in which case they go all wide-eyed and passive-aggressive, and loony you out of the équation.
It’s good to see you running a blog at last, Bob. Only way for your kind of writer to get fully out there nowadays, I suspect. That, and fiction, I think.
Yeah, passive voice and removing all verbs, they all do it. It strips definition and therefore responsibility out of the text/speech.
This kind of linguistic cancer is found everywhere in politics and business. Don Watson wrote several excellent books on the subject.
It arises when someone doesn’t have the vocabulary to convey their meaning, or wants to speak for a long time without saying much of anything, or wants to mask their ignorance, or perhaps when they want to exclude those who don’t know the language.
It starts at the top, then others start using these meaningless words/phrases because they don’t know any better or are too scared to say “could you please explain exactly what you meant there?”. Do it, it’s great fun to watch the look on the user’s face when they realise they’ve just spewed a whole lot of nonsense.
Try ‘We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it’ in the middle of a long meeting and see if anyone picks up on it.
Bob, you were so right on Gillard being the perfect deputy…but a terrible leader. In the end, it should have been Roxon or Plibersek. Socialist Thatchers, they would have destroyed the Liberal Party. They would have, because of not having a better word, the balls to do it.