There’s a great article in TechCrunch about the mangling of a Benjamin Franklin quote. As always, a product of laziness, lack of fact-checking and an inability to place an historical situation (or quote) in its context (and instead mindlessly applying it to a modern context).
Mighty fails
SMH front page, top left spot (aka pole position):
A cracking 150-plus partnership between David Warner and Alex Doolan has put the visitors in a dominate position on day 3 in South Africa.
Looks like the inability to distinguish between “predominant” and “predominate” has spread. Continue Reading →
Sports manglish
I initially thought the following clumsy paragraph was a simple sub-editor’s mistake in the SMH. However, on re-reading, it seems to have been intentional:
The following evening as his younger brother Mitch watched their 28-year-old sister Melissa play her final home match in her top-level basketball career Shaun was an absentee, by virtue of notification the South Africa tour duty that had been called off for him was suddenly back on, and that he needed to pack and get to the airport for a 11.45pm flight from Perth to Johannesburg.
Brain hurt. But wait; there’s more. Continue Reading →
Illegality
It looks like Justice Gordon has found ANZ’s late payment fees to be penalties. However, this does not make them “illegal” or “against the law”. Penalties are void or unenforceable (see Andrew v ANZ), but this is as a matter of contract (including, and often in particular, principles of equity).
The word illegality has a chameleonic quality, but it is better used to describe conduct involving a breach of the criminal law (or breach of statute) — in other words, conduct contrary to law — rather than conduct that is simply ineffective at general law. (The former question can sometimes itself be difficult to determine, as recognised in Miller v Miller).
Hence the SMH is wrong to say that the Federal Court “ruled [the ANZ’s] late payment fees charged on credit cards were illegal”. The AFR is likewise technically wrong to describe them as an “illegal penalty”, although the word is there used in its more lay sense. The real description is that the relevant fees were invalid because they were penalties.
More facepalm-inducing is this howler:
It also throws out ANZ’s six-year statute of limitations, meaning anyone who has ever been charged a late fee by ANZ can potentially now claim those fees back.
How anyone could think that a “statute of limitations” could be “ANZ’s”, rather than, say, a statute enacted by a Parliament, is just … I don’t know
Malapropisms
Great article in the SMH. The best one surely has to be:
You might hear this described as something that you’ve got to “nip it in the butt”. This one’s quite a funny one when you hear it being said incorrectly. What you should be trying to do is “nip it in the bud”.
Twiggy
Just months before the original Mac debuted 30 years ago, it was deeply troubled by an in-house 5.25″ flimsy floppy-disk drive it relied on called the Twiggy (you know, for it’s flimsiness)
I hope that was said tongue-in-cheek. See: skinny British model famous in the 60s. (Not to mention the misuse of “it’s”).