Things I cannot say but would really like to

I haven’t written my blog for quite a while so here’s some things I can’t say in the newspaper about things I’ve read:

If someone has won the inaugural medal, they cannot have won it two years previously.

Larva does not mean many young insects.

If you’re going to have a go at someone’s grammar, then don’t do it by writing:

‘Readers picture’ when you mean ‘Reader’s picture’ and then adding ‘Attention to detail is not Council’s criteria’ when you mean ‘priority’ and as well as using the wrong word, you used it in the wrong tense, singular would be ‘criterion’.

Don’t copy and paste from the internet.

Don’t write ‘Emmylou Harris was discovered by Gram Parsons in 1976,’ when he died in 1973.

What is it with words that end in ‘onic’? Ironic and iconic are not interchangeable, do not mean what you think they do and should never appear in your copy. A sentence I never want to see again:

‘The children wore the iconic colours of orange and grey’.

But what I’d really like to say:

“How did you ignorant, language-murdering, cliché-loving, idea-deficient drones who would have no idea what I meant if I asked, politely, to please fucking stop writing in the passive voice – how did you semi-literate, press-release-regurgitating, formula-driven pretenders ever get jobs as journalists?

“Don’t you fucking read? Don’t you know how to use a spell-check? To double check your first sentence before you file, so you don’t make basic errors like spelling ‘Darly Brathwaite’ when you mean ‘Daryl Braithwaite’ ? To check your facts? Do you know what ‘cynicism’ means? Don’t you know things happened before 2000? And we had computers in the 80s, just not ones on which tedious people would continually broadcast mindless minutiae.

“I despise your small minds and your lack of imagination. I am constantly irritated by your seemingly-random disregard for capital letters and their indiscriminate use.

“No fucking wonder the newspaper industry is in free-fall – if I were not being paid for the torturous experience of reading your excruciating copy, I would rather spend an entire day trying to make sense of Barnaby Joyce than read your meaningless words.

“Newspapers are dead. We killed them the same way we kill everything: not enough care.

“And I blame you, the last of the pretenders, you fucking idiots who wouldn’t know a decent story if Harold Holt walked in and said he killed Azaria Chamberlain because neither they nor the dingo has been on X-Factor.

“Get fucked.’’

I fucking hate working Sundays.