h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The 1440 Daily Digest is designed for people who want the news without a lot of spin. I had hoped to be able to know what's going on without wading through countless reports. Sometimes I forget to read it, though.

Any other news source practically needs translation. Even at Fox, you have the Sean Hannities but you also have Bret Baier (who seems capable of seeing things straight and not letting Trump go unchallenged).

Things seem to change fast. Some news sources take longer to get the latest news.

I had thought that Mrs. Malaprop was a Dickensian character. Dickens, like Shakespeare, seemed to have characters who got things a bit mixed up....

Burning that much Teflon would probably lead to massive EPA claims for PFAS pollution.

Most of the news I follow is not live television broadcasting, so I am probably lucky to be spared most of that kind of stuff.

Good! I'd hate to imagine what it would sound like in Dutch. In the early 80s we used to like to watch the TV news in Dutch (we lived in Cologne and had our choice) because it sounded more reassuring that way.

Okay, also because the Germans had boring, expressionless, middleaged male newsreaders and the Dutch had attractive, well-dressed younger women - and the sight of an attractive lady making the kinds of faces you have to make to enunciate Dutch at a camera is funny to outsiders, especially if they teach languages.

Early 80's... Let's see, that must have been Maartje van Weegen, Elleke van Doorn or Noraly Beyer. Pia Dijkstra was late 80's.

We have also had our share of the other kind.

I guess it's a worldwide phenomenon.

Digging into Dutch TV news history some more, I just noticed that apparently from the early 80s even weeks have had a male presenter, and odd weeks a female presenter for the 8pm news. How have I never noticed this?

I didn't remember that.

We were fond of Dutch and Belgian tv. No dubbing for the films, just subtitles. Much better than the German dubbed versions.

Germans are famous for their Nachsynchronisierung. I remember we had some quotes circulating of really ridiculous sounding sentences, like "Ich komme wieder" for "I'll be back" in Terminator or tenor voice actors dubbing an original bass voice.

With subtitles and dubbing on DVD's you can make a challenge for the kids, watching movies they already know with different spoken languages and / or subtitles. I did notice that the dubbing and the subtitles don't match sometimes. I suppose the voice actors got creative...

Yes, I notice that, too.

When we were kids, one of the features of Saturday afternoon television was the gladiator movie, aka something from Cinecitta. I found them boring, but my sister liked them. Dubbing Italian into English is challenging - the sound always stopped before the actors' mouths stopped moving.

Due to the large vocabulary English can be very compact.

True.

"why are the reporters doing it? These aren't sportscasters." - I wonder if that is a reflection of how live news is some sort of spectator sport... Vintage blooper shows have examples of 'word salad', but 24 hour news channels probably make things worse - more time to fill, and more competition for fresh angles, all of which cause words to be mangled...

"Is everybody going to wake up one day soon, unable to talk in anything except technobabble and adspeak?" - on the other hand this is also a possibility, yes, as phrases become popular, as you say, and get overused to the point of misuse... Also potential to be like the Tower of Babel, where new words/phrases appear, but are defined differently depending on who is doing the defining and for what purpose. At best the resulting arguments are frustrating, as they would be solved if people simply stated their definitions instead of using the 'shorthand' words in different ways, but at worst the arguments are deliberately designed to create 'us' and 'them'...

>>using the 'shorthand' words in different ways<<

That's a good point, Sasha! The new-speak words are fine if they help us communicate, but if they divide, you could get a Tower of Babel, for sure.

It's like this whole 'woke' business. The term 'woke' was coined by a specific group with a specific meaning that made sense in context. Then it got borrowed and used enthusiastically by another group. This in turn annoyed a third group, who took it to mean something else entirely. And now it's travelling outside the US, where it's taking on new layers of confusion.

Yesterday I found it being used in German. Lord knows what they think it means...

Eventually it will die out as a widespread concept, and someone will celebrate a wake for it

So now you tell me woke isn't the same as wookiee?

I saw "Asteroid city" today. Fifteen minutes before the end, the whole cast chanted "If you aren't asleep, you can't wake up." The movie had put me to sleep by that point, so I of course woke up

I saw the trailer and read the plot. I'm pretty sure I would fall asleep, too.

Yes 'woke' was one of the words I was thinking of, and 'gay' is another one, where it began being used as a synonym for 'rubbish', which gives the impression that it was being used that way by people who think gay people are rubbish...

'Sick' is another one, where it is being used to mean 'brilliant' rather than 'disgusting', so context is needed. I see there are a few 'contronyms' already in common use, so it can be viewed as another one of those (like 'makes a mean cake' - could be average/stingy or excellent). I see online that 'mean cake' is probably a contraction of 'no mean cake' meaning 'not average cake', and 'sick' is possibly linked to 'sickening' (often used in Ru Paul's Drag Race) which is something like 'so sweet it makes you feel ill'. I have to admit the taste of the word is unpleasant in my synaesthesia, so it does jar when someone uses it to mean 'brilliant'...

Hey, thanks for explaining that use of 'sick'! I didn't know where that came from.

Of course, every generation thinks it invented slang. That's been going on since Hector was a pup. (That's an ancient piece of slang that predates me by about a century, I think.)

Even without slang, it gets hard to follow the 'discourse' over time. I just pulled this up from a newspaper in 1932. It's from columnist Heywood Broun, who was well-regarded. Can you summarise what he said in one short sentence?

'The newspaper profession ought to be jealous of its own ethics. The members of the craft have a right to consider themselves as cogs in the community fully as vital as doctors or lawyers. It should be very vitally our task to establish rigidly the definition of what is news and what is mere intrusion.

Of course, it is not easy to draw the line. Some may contend that whatever commands public interest is a matter of public concern. But to some extent a rather too morbid curiosity has been created by journalism's current concern with events called blessed.'

That is a tricky paragraph - 'jealousy' and 'envy' are often confused these days, and I can't visualise what 'events called blessed' might be...

I see 'jealous' means 'protective' (which is linked to, but not exactly the same as, 'not wanting other people to have what you have', in contrast to 'envy' being 'wanting what other people have').

So the paragraph is saying something like: journalism is important for communication, but the line between news and gossip is thin. Wise words.