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Desperately seeking relief
By Steven | June 19, 2008
Readers will know I’m a generally fan of free speech. But I would support a ban on the use, by all politicians in every election year, of the word “desperate”.
Topics: General, Media ethics | 3 Comments »
3 Responses to “Desperately seeking relief”
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June 19th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Not a bad choice.
My personal favourites are “outrage”, “travesty”, “debacle”, “bureaucracy” (esp. said with that ugly hissing noise at the end), “bloated” (see bureaucracy), “tax cuts” (over already).
One of the nice things about National bludgeoning Labour over the head with petty interpretations of the finer points of the EFA is that we are likely for the first time in many years to see an election with much less empty noise and clutter.
For many elections now no one has really talked in depth about policy and if they did, the media rarely reported it in depth and if they did, few read it in depth. Maybe 200 bloggers and other assorted oddballs. (Mea culpa).
So the effect of the EFA on “public discourse” may be more calming than chilling……AND we get to see who the big donors were (for a change).
We may want to reflect on the relative peace and quiet before throwing this law out. If we want to know anything, we can go to someone’s web site and look it up.
The only problem there is that some parties have decided they don’t wont anyone knowing their policies anyway…..so I’m bit foozled as to why they feel their freedom of speech has been infringed and public discourse undermined when they don’t want to tell anyone what they are about anyway.
Elections. Gotta love’em.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:28 am
I would like to see “at the end of the day” banned.
June 20th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I would ban “in any way, shape or form” as it is rarely, if ever, used to describe things that have shape or form. Also, things that do take a shape or form are probably not able to be described as being in a “way”. “In any way” will suffice.