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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2018 10:51:37 GMT
It used to be, in Oz, that one used the possessive apostrophe on its own mainly on classical (e.g. Aristophanes') or biblical (e.g. Moses', Jesus') names while using the apostrophe-s on other names and common nouns, e.g. Charles's, James's, boss's). Now it's becoming the generally accepted form to use the 's regardless (so Charles's, James's, Jesus's, Moses's). I admit that Aristophanes's "sounds wrong", but that's probably more a case of what one is used to.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2018 10:58:34 GMT
Yesterday I parked in front of an electricity meter box and noticed this sign – with its incongruous meter for metre. Parking within the meter (which is inside the meter box) would be either quite an achievement or a motoring disaster.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2018 12:24:14 GMT
Here is a YouTube video on the Australian accent(s). Based on the descriptions and examples given, I’d have to (self-)assess my speech as lying between that of Ian Thorpe (“general”) and Geoffrey Rush (“cultivated”) – so “semi-cultivated” perhaps. I probably slide up or down that small scale depending upon register and audience.
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Post by Dave Miller on Aug 18, 2018 15:59:31 GMT
Well, full marks for the eyes and the teeth (!), but what is a "creditional"? (About 35 seconds in).
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 22, 2018 9:42:23 GMT
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Post by Dave Miller on Aug 22, 2018 12:05:55 GMT
[/a] Bushfires are becoming wildfires.[/quote] Seems pretty clear to me: a bushfire happens out in the bush. A wildfire can happen anywhere (including the bush). If you call it a bushfire and then it travels and reaches a housing area and burns down a street of houses, when do you change the name? And it's still only one fire, in the houses and a couple of miles away in scrubland, so do people start talking about TWO fires?
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 22, 2018 13:18:25 GMT
Wildfire has never until very recently been in common use in Oz to describe what we've always called a bushfire.
Bush in Ozlish refers to wooded scrubland or, more generally, to anywhere neither cultivated / grazed, nor within coo-ee of peopled settlements.
The creeping into the "news" reportage lexicon of this newcomer wildfire is a quite new trend, and seems to have followed the last few fire seasons of California – and their graphic worldwide reporting as wildfires.
Our local media writers / talking heads are merely parroting the latest psittacism (psittacising the latest parrotism?) – not entirely in error but in mindless imitation of the US, in the spirit of the Ozzie Cultural Cringe. Perhaps?
Oz bushfires do encroach on and damage / destroy towns, but they don't seem to change their description from bush~ to wild~; if anything, they become merely fires.
Tiger Webb is pleasant company and a good laugh, but his approach is for me far too liberal / flexible. The once-considered quality mark of a publishing house was consistency of style, something our Aunty had in spades until about five years ago. Aunty ABC has abandoned that stylistic consistency in extremis, which I find constantly annoying as I read frequent and regularly repeating mismatches / typos / punctuation disasters … in the same article, let alone across the publication. To me it says sloppy (speed versus quality, perhaps, in today's Instant Gratification / snappy-three-word slogans and monosyllabic headlines era. Tiger and I agree to disagree. Strongly.
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