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Public Address
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 1654
Hard News: Swine flu and swearing
There is bad news and good news about swine flu. The bad news, obviously, is that New Zealanders have died or become gravely ill after being infected with the H1N1 virus. The first victim was an apparently healthy young man whose father found him dead in the morning. An infected baby is in intensive care at Starship after suffering a cardiac arrest.
James Liddell
From: Wellington
Since: Jul 2007
Posts: 98
Yes, that's all from one episode. What must his mother think?
Well it's certainly quantity, but it's not really quality swearing. For that you can't go past The Thick of It. Armando Iannucci has a swearing consultant to whom he sends his scripts to make them more, um, colourful.
giovanni tiso
From: Wellington
Since: Jun 2007
Posts: 4368
Quality swearing is so important. Take the novel Q. I don't know how if they got Iannucci's guy for the English translation, but in Italian it fell over due to the poor quality of the swearing. It was sad, really.
Idiot Savant
From: Palmerston North
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 1210
I'll second "The Thick of It". Both quality and quantity.
Richard Llewellyn
From: Mt Albert
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 358
a swearing consultant to whom he sends his scripts to make them more, um, colourful
What a cool job! I know some people who are gold-standard, bet they didn't know it was a career option.
Gareth Davidson
From: Sydney
Since: Mar 2007
Posts: 18
Before long they'll be putting motors on those bikes, then giving them four wheels and doors...
Graeme Edgeler
From: Wellington, New Zealand
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 1509
Matt Nippert
From: Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 19
For a true masterclass in swearing and scriptwriting, check out this gem from The Wire. There's precious little dialogue, exempting prefixes and suffixes, outside glorious f-bombs.
cheers,
Matt
Matt Nippert
From: Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 19
Graeme just delivered a masterclass in why you shouldn't spend a few minutes to edit posts.
Dang.
Heather W.
From: North Shore
Since: Nov 2008
Posts: 152
Before long they'll be putting motors on those bikes, then giving them four wheels and doors...
Extra wheels and (sometimes) doors come with the Velomobile
Or with a motor-bike, comes a real side-car
Peter Darlington
From: Nelson
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 552
Always enjoyed Shameless for their attention to swearative detail as well.
Zippy Gonzales
From: Wellington
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 163
What does Kevin Bloody Wilson's mother think? Does your Dad own a brewery?
Thrash Cardiom
From: CHB
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 15
Swine Flu....
Might have it. I'm at home at the moment with mild flu like symptoms and I had the flu shot back in May. My partner came back from Wgtn a couple of weeks and ended up in bed with it for a week. Her nephew from Wgtn, currently staying with us, is also ill.
Julian Melville
From: Auckland
Since: Dec 2006
Posts: 117
So … has anyone had it?
Haven't had it, but the case of Zachary Wilson is a bit close to home for us, his dad works for a close relative's business. Very sad all round.
giovanni tiso
From: Wellington
Since: Jun 2007
Posts: 4368
So … has anyone had it?
Robyn has had a swine cold.
John Fouhy
From: Wellington
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 56
What will they think of next? One of these, maybe: http://www.spinadvertising.co.nz/ecogo/
(but what would my local mechanic think of it?)
Caleb D'Anvers
From: Somewhere in Buckinghamshire
Since: Mar 2008
Posts: 299
Robyn has had a swine cold.
Wow. i think I had the exact same bug on the exact same days . It did make the MJ news that little bit more surreal.
Whoops
From: here
Since: Apr 2007
Posts: 47
A new bike?
Woohoo! You'll be riding over the harbour bridge in no time, with Mr Slack tucked in behind for some aero draft action on the descent. Slack by name, slack by nature and all that...
Hilary Stace
From: Wgtn
Since: Jun 2008
Posts: 756
Go Sacha.
Danielle
From: PAS Women's XV Strategic Headquarters
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 2249
Ahem. I give you possibly my favourite poetic swearing line ever:
'I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker.'
Thank you, Ellsworth from Deadwood. Thank you.
uroskin
From: Waiheke Island
Since: Feb 2007
Posts: 91
Swearing on TV: unfortunately Censor Bill has no jurisdiction, it's the Broadcast Standards Authority you should invite.
Swine flu: can we get rid of this moniker? If it's good enough for the Spanish it should be good enough for the Mexicans. BTW Aljazeera is never calling it by its porcine name, always H1N1
Geoff Lealand
From: Univ of Waikato
Since: Oct 2007
Posts: 832
Swearing on TV: unfortunately Censor Bill has no jurisdiction, it's the Broadcast Standards Authority you should invite.
Quite so. They do occasional research on "Acceptable language: swearing and blasphemy on radio and television", trying to measure public standards. I did such research for them years ago--it was kind of fun asking people what they thought of the use of sh*t and f*ck and the like.
Still, Censor Bill is likely to be entertaining.
Ian Dalziel
From: Christchurch
Since: Dec 2006
Posts: 395
After Bathing at Baxters...
Our government has ordered 300,000 doses of an experimental swine flu vaccine from an American company. The vaccine will arrive within a month, but, barring emergency, won't be approved for use until around December.
That'd be the same Baxter International that earlier
this year sent out live avian flu virus mixed with
vaccine material would it...?
Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries.
Talk about drumming up business...
Yrs
Jefferson EarPain
Bros against the Empire
Joe Wylie
From: Behind the barn down on my knees
Since: Jan 2007
Posts: 1415
Thank you, Ellsworth from Deadwood. Thank you.
Right, _Deadwood _ - that show elevated swearing like no other.
There was a great discussion a few years back on the ABC's Australia Talks Back , on Radio National, hosted by Sandy McCutcheon, on the subject of the f-word. A guy called with a story about how he'd been a fire warden in a small North Coast NSW town as a teenager during WW2. He was given a tin hat emblazoned with the letters FW. Everyone he met on his rounds would smirk, and he'd smirk back. The ones he enjoyed most were the little old ladies whose vocabularies one wouldn't assume would have included the word f*ckwit.
Josh Addison
From: Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 215
No-one swears like Ray Winstone. I forget which movie it was in which he called someone a "f*cking sh*tc*nt", but it changed my life(asterisks for the benefits for those with work filters).
Sofie Bribiesca
From: here and there.
Since: Nov 2007
Posts: 2240
Swine flu: can we get rid of this moniker? If it's good enough for the Spanish it should be good enough for the Mexicans.
Don't think so. First spotted in the States and if memory serves, a visit to Mexico does not a State make.:)
Sofie Bribiesca
From: here and there.
Since: Nov 2007
Posts: 2240
"f*cking sh*tc*nt",
Was that "Sexy Beast"?
Glenn Pearce
From: Auckland
Since: Feb 2007
Posts: 169
went out and bought a new bike
Try not to do what I did the first weekend I got my new MTB Russell.
Straight out to Woodhill, age and enthusiasm not matched by my skill, as a consequence the end of my collar bone is about 2-3cm from where it should be.
A friend who's a doc at North Shore A&E reckons they get half their patients from Woodhill Mountain Biking, the other half from Snowplanet !
slarty
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 220
I love to swear. I often get on trouble for it. I am in awe of any word that can be used so generously, and still make sense. One day on the farm a tractor packed in, and my uncle uttered the immortal phrase.
"Fuck the fucken fucker, the fuckers fucked".
See? Magnificent.
I have a theory that over time words are "classified" by cliques. The young tend to adopt words to be trendy. Others classify them as 'vulgar' as a way of establishing class.
In the UK it is the very upper and lower classes who swear (you can probably guess where I originate). I can picture the emerging middle classes in Victorian times 'banning' words, as a mechanism to distinguish and exclude the not-quite middle classes.
A bit like the person who decided that British English would stop using the letter 'z' in recognize, and the poncy twat who decided that in New Zealand we would put an 'r' in data (date, datum, darta: WTF?).
Splitters.
giovanni tiso
From: Wellington
Since: Jun 2007
Posts: 4368
My favourite swearing situation not involving George Carlin is the time when Dorothy Parker explained she hadn't been able to make an appointment because she was "too fucking busy, or vice versa".
James Butler
From: Auckland
Since: Jan 2009
Posts: 110
It's a GT hybrid
Try not to do what I did the first weekend I got my new MTB Russell
I've tried one of those GTs with the locking suspension, and that one was a good tarmac bike, but it would last about 10m at Woodhill before gracefully folding up into a little pile of tubes and spokes. I'm gathering that's not what it's for.
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