Quote:

It is wrong to attribute this solecism to Australian English.

As someone who has worked in television production (and, I might add, is of antipodean extraction on the spindle side) I can tell you a general truth -- proven by long and bitter experience -- about the kind of person who writes the commercial blurbs in that industry, Australian, American or English: a litterateur he is not.

Turn on your television, any television, and listen to your commercials, reality television programs, talk shows and infomercials with the same critical ear. That will suffice to silence all criticism.

But, let it be said in passing, this slight is typical of the cultural cringe accompanying colonial modernism. And supposing any of you guilty of it are American, you should remember that European intellectuals cringed the same cringe at your cultural heritage upon immigrating to the New World to escape the Nazi’s during World War Two.

The recently arrived French Surrealists, for example, contemned the Abstract Expressionists and action painting of the so-called "New York School" ; Continental writers were similarly hostile to the American literary developments of the 1950s, as is evident from letters, journals, and numerous documented encounters.

If the "vulgar yanks" had let that extinguish their muse, there'd be no Pollock, no Ginsberg, Burroughs or Kerouac.




Well, it's just plain stupid, isn't it?