Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Lipsticking the gilded language pig
Language changes through use and misuse. I’m no linguistic expert so I offer no opinion on whether the English language has got better or worse over the last 100 years in its precision and richness. But it surely can’t be a good thing when commentators on the telly (a useful addition to the language, I think) say “come” when they mean “came”. My mum, bless her heart, always used to be “coming” when she should have been “caming”. But then she had no pretensions to be a public broadcaster. Having also visited Lithgow on numbers of occasions in recent years, I can attest that “came” was seldom used, at least in the company I kept.
The adverb too has largely disappeared from sports broadcasts. Players these days run “quick”. Again, personally, I don’t think this represents an improvement to (or is it “in”?) the language.
The frequent use of “oxymoron” annoys me. It’s constantly misused when the speaker simply means “a contradiction in terms” but wants to appear sophisticated. How…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins
