Tuesday, January 1, 2013

"Funky Ableist Prejudice"

English, our wonderful tongue, is forever changing, and not only when the board of the Macquarie Dictionary convenes an emergency meeting to justify the abuse of a decent man by a slattern who helped steal the funeral funds of miners' widows and waifs. At the ABC and on Twitter, sometime Q&A guest Stella Young delivers a pithy lecture on words and their latest, officially approved definitions:


Klara S. would be well advised to argue the toss no further. The irate Stella has a reputation for being short
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2 comments:

  1. The Old and Unimproved DaveJanuary 1, 2013 at 3:57 PM

    Hmm, looks like that brain cell's not big enough for the both of 'em.

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  2. AnonymousMarch 30, 2013 at 9:05 PM

    Dear Prof Bunyip,

    I have been going through Alecia’s oeuvre and must really write again to thank you for the brilliant entertainment. It resembles the best situation comedies, most laughs coming from unexpected but in retrospect totally predictable idiocies uttered by the characters.

    Alecia’s 17 February effort on the cultural cringe is a masterpiece. First several long paragraphs exposing the one-upmanship of Europhiles now mercifully departing after their summer sojourns in Oz. I don’t know that anyone has “done” this lot before; they are largely a product of the bloated bureaucrat salaries and super-high Aussie dollar of the last few years. Alecia’s satire of these prigs seems genuine enough - it’s just slightly over-written. But in fact it’s only there to set us up for a ridiculous political “sucker punch” and switch to a feminist version of Les Patterson-style raving about “world-class” Aussie culture:

    "I would understand this if we were still living under Menzies or Howard. If we were 19th Century ladies flung to a convict dumping heap on the other side of the earth then of course Europe would look sophisticated by comparison. But we’re not. We’re a country with a breathtaking line-up of artistic events this year (Anish Kapoor and Francis Bacon to name but two) restaurants that would make any Parisian die of pleasure, universities with world-leading Professors and a fantastic history of feminist activism, democratic reform and workers’ rights."

    The capital P on professors is just what Les would have done, and the jarring disproportion of "fastastic", "breathtaking line-up" and "make any Parisian die of pleasure" are spot-on for Alecia’s character. Chapeau, n’est-ce pas?

    Apart from Les, I see forebears in Pseud’s Corner, Tim and Debbie, even Juvenal. But what would I know? Alecia’s corpus merits thorough study by Australia’s university classes, if only, as an old friend once put it, "to show them what pricks they are". Are you going to "come out" on All Fools Day?

    All the best,

    Dave Brewer

    [davebrewer56@hotmail.com, address not for publication please]

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