Obscure Box

Many style guides for news organisations here in Australia are lax of the use of commas in numbers 1,000 t0 9,999. They prefer to drop the comma and opt for 1000 to 9999. Commas are fine higher numbers with digits grouped in threes so it’s 10,000 and 1,000,000 and so on. I think the commas [...]

I’m growing increasingly puzzled by the comments that are allowed on some news stories posted online. Sometimes there are none. Does that mean no one really cares about the story? Sometimes there are many. Too many. Hundreds. When you read through a few it’s quite clear that the majority of commenter’s have not read any [...]

It’s a brave sub that opts for a headline with so much potential for mispronunciation. So it was that the ABC posted a story it headlined “Cup punt not child’s play” on Melbourne Cup day (Tuesday November 3, 2009). I’m sure the linguists have a name for it; that move from the first word to [...]

Who hasn’t cursed at the automated telephone answering systems that have infected many organisations today? Press 1 for rage, press 2 for even more rage and press 3 if you would like to swear at our automated response system in another language. “I just want to talk to someone,” a very forward UK bank advert [...]

Too often these days you call an organisation looking to speak to someone for a story only to be told you’ll be sent a media release. Sometimes the protesting works and you get to speak to a human being, sometimes it doesn’t and you are left with a statement that claims to be the words [...]