Reporter's Diary

Press, 7 August 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

"TEA’S UP..."

Strong brew A RECENT article in the "Financial Times” about the acquisition of the Australian tea firm. Bushel! Investments, by an even bigger British ’ tea firm. Brooke Bond Leibig, attempts to explain why Bushells is so popular "Down Under.” By the sound of it, the British do not have a very high opinion of Antipodean tea.

Bushells, the story says, “not only makes unique billy tea — more a stew than a liquid — which has preservative qualities well known to drovers and bushwhackers. It also has other uses. Australian do-it-yourself mechanics are said to use it for stripping rust from car engines, their wives use it to dye stockings, and the best maidenhair ferns will grow on nothing else.”

Home remedy A YOUNG lawyer in Christchurch, who sent his 1 e g a l-eagle three-piece, dark suit to the dry-clean-* ers to have some stains removed, was most disappointed when he picked it up from the cleaners with a note attached saying: “The marks have been noted, but any further attempts to remove them might damage the fabric.” His wife, however, when he showed her the suit, attacked the stains with a sponge and cold water and they disappeared in a few seconds. Back rental? INFLATION is slowly catching up with the tenant of a Catchment Board house at Foxes Creek reserve, it seems. At a recent meeting of the board, approval was given to raise the rental for the house from $52 to $75 per annum — or to less than $1.50 a week. IFages at stake OFFICE sweepstakes on the outcome of the recent general wage order application apparently were popular in Wellington. One such sweep was held in the offices of the New Zealand Planning Council, where, according to the noticeboard in the tearooms, guesses ranged from 41 per cent to 8| per cent. The winning guess, of 7 per cent, was by an economist on the council staff. The chairman (Sir

Frank Holmes), who made submissions to the Arbitration Court on the wagerise application, was one of the entrants in the sweepstake, but he did not manage to guess the right figure. Short hobby ABBREVIATIONS are of intense interest to Mr Arthur Ivory, a self-styled lexicographer, of Christchurch, whose particular concern is that British dictionaries are not “Pacific ctionaries are not “Pacific oriented,” and therefore “do not reflect the changing patterns of the English language in this important area.” Mr Ivory, who has about 40 dictionaries of English and abbreviations at his home in St Martins, hopes to produce a “Pacific Index of Abbreviations” at the end of the year. He has written to the editors of British national daily newspapers to draw their attention to British dictionaries that are “woefully deficient in recording new economic trends.” His particular gripe is that the words “Australasia and Antarctica still remain terra incognita to most British popular dictionaries.” He says this is just not good enough for the 500 million people he believes use English as the main medium of communication in the Pacific Basin. On the subject of abbreviations, he says, in 1976, he “circumnavigated the globe on a semantic odyssey, searching for the

latest trends and techniques in abbreviation terminology.” Analysis of British newspapers, he says, revealed that the influential national dailies, such as "The Times”, the “Observer” and the “Guardian”, used a lot of abbreviations in their articles, whereas the London tabloids used as few as possible. Mr Ivory concludes that intelligent British readers are more familiar with abbreviations than their less sophisticated London tabloid readers. Q.E.D. Card contest EXPONENTS of the traditional West Coast card game of 45s are again sharpening their form in preparation for the national championship at Greymouth on September 2. Last year, 450 players from throughout New Zealand took part in the contest, when the title was won by a women’s combination from Reefton — Pat Stephens and Jean Wilson. They beat Fred and Alice Williams, of Fox Glacier, in the final. The best that any team from outside the West Coast could manage was fifth. Trite to type A SIGN spotted recently above a rack of seed packets in a hardware store reads, “French beans. Not prize-winners but good runners-up.” —Felicity Price