Posts by Emma Hart
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A friend asked me what I thought of Torchwood and I realised that after watching seven episodes, I still don't know. I think I like it...
Prime is the only channel playing anything in 'family viewing' time that I'm happy with our family viewing. Dr Who, then Stargate Atlantis with its fabulous fan service. We're also big Top Gear fans. Now, if TV2 would only shift Brainiac from 5:30 to 7:30 I'd be really happy. Every kid should be watching that.
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I've lived on the Plains since I was four, and regularly driven the road between Christchurch and Timaru several times a year.
There wasn't enough water there for SHEEP in the 80s. Dairy farming is just unsustainable. It's already affecting other businesses in the area, from tourist cafes that can't flush their toilets to fishing guides like my father-in--civil-union-law. Every time I see irrigation going full bore in a howling nor-wester my blood pressure rises.
North Canterbury farmers polluted their own bores so badly they had to start buying in bottled water. I'm not anti-farming and I've nothing against dairying in climates that can sustain it, but when your lack of care for the environment gets to the point where you've poisoned your children's drinking water, you really do have to start wondering.
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Where do we draw the line between pompous and acceptable?
When no-one can understand you any more, you've hit pompous. I'd given up on 'stadia' because people looked at me blankly. 'Pompous' isn't correctly using 'criteria', it's correctly using 'criterion'.
Obviously, given language is social, how pompous you are depends on how pompous the people around you are.
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A help-desk/admin friend of mine would like to me to put forward
pebkac
- problem exists between keyboard and chair
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One of my writing partners insists on describing her character as having 'chocolate brown eyes'. You can have all kinds of fun with a hyphen in that clause.
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It's another case of a superlative being devalued, cos you can replace it with "quite good" and the meaning stays the same.
I've just been writing on cricket and reminded of how much I love the way words change their meaning when applied to that game. For instance:
average - bad
decidedly average - bloody appalling
poor - abysmalYou have to love a game, too, that gives us the word 'nurdle' and produces potential sentences like "Pietersen has spanked Warne through the covers".
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I really like 'opisthenar'. I dunno why we need a specific word for the back of your hand or why it should be that, but the look on people's faces when you say, "It's okay, I know this place like my opisthenar" could well be the reason.
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I'll be parochial and guess Todd Blackadder, who's also been known to produce the odd complete sentence.
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Truthiness
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My Dad was a butcher, I've seen sausages made. I didn't eat sausages until I was in my twenties. I have, however, a total fascination for watching the political process played out. I'd be just as compelled to watch all this play out if it was Labour giving tours of its smallgoods plant instead of National. It's the primary source quotes that fascinate me, not anybody's 'dot drawing', sorry.