On language

by Urban Variable

For my sins, I occasionally read online comments for various things (with the resulting sense of revulsion inevitably leaving me to scurry behind a paywall again, or at the very least seek refuge in alcohol and kicking small animals). On political articles, ine thing I’ve noticed is an incessant droning about ALP “stuff ups”, running out the usual discredited nonsense about pink batts or school halls or people daring to seek refuge or whatever.

“Stuff up” to mean failure is an interesting turn of phrase. The idiom is familiar, of course, but having lived in Australia for lo these many years it’s not one I encountered often – now, it seems to be common, but only in comments about what passes for left wing politics here. It’s as if the idiots who comment on such articles were working to a script.

That’s not what it really reminds me of, though. In my younger days, I was involved in marketing, and one of the things we used to do was use a particular phrase to test the penetration of a message – if we used a slightly unusual ordering of words in an advertisement, and the customer came in and also used that ordering, we could presume they’d been influenced by the ad (and conclusions were drawn, and reports written, and a jolly old time was had – occasionally, someone would even sell something).

A cursory Google suggests to me that the Liberals started using the phrase in 2010, ramped it up in 2011, and then eased off a bit through 2012 and 2013, which is a similar pattern to the one we used to run.

Paredolia, or is there a team in William St busily counting occurrences and writing reports?