[Update Friday 16 May 2014, 1115 AEST: Having read the spectrogram analysis by “Fully (sic)â€, the language blog at Crikey, I withdraw pretty much everything I’ve said in this post. I did indeed hear the word I thought I heard, but only after having read a headline that told me that’s that I was going to hear. I forget the name for that psychological phenomenon — is it “primingâ€? — but I know it’s a thing. Anyone listening to the audio files here would have been subject to the same phenomenon.]
Today in the Australian Parliament, Christopher Maurice Pyne MP, Member for Sturt, Minister for Education and Leader of the House, said a word which he says was “grub”. I call Christopher Pyne a liar.
The sentence said across the chamber to Opposition leader Bill Shorten (or maybe someone else) was, quite clearly [to me], “You’re such a cunt.” Listen for yourself.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:26 — 737.7KB)
I will be discussing the phonetics of “grub” versus “cunt” in the next episode of The 9pm Edict. Read the analysis at “Fully (sic)”.
I’m happy to respond to your comments on this stuff, but I’ll be busy recording my podcast sleeping and covering a conference in San Jose before finishing my podcast production, and won’t respond until that’s all finished. Be warned, however, that I’ll simply delete comments that are nothing more that party-political trolling. Keep it to the discussion of phonetics, appropriate language for parliament and suchlike. My website, my rules.
What I will say, however, is that I don’t really care what Pyne said. In the heat of the moment we’ve all said things we later regret. Sometimes, for some people, that might involve swearing. What concerns me is the character of a man who simply lies in the face of the evidence, rather than taking responsibility for his own words and actions. That’s just low.
Christopher Maurice Pyne, you truly are a grub. No, the other word.
There will doubtless be questions about the authenticity of this recording, so I’ll spell out precisely what you’re listening to here.
This audio file is the result of going to a ninemsn news story, since removed, at the URL http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/pyne-calls-shorten-c-bomb-in-parliament/x78q4ru in the web browser Safari for OS X, and using Audio Hijack Pro to extract the audio of the video as it streamed and saving it into a 16-bit 44.1kHz AIFF audio file. I imported that file into Reaper, a digital audio workstation, trimmed the ends to fit, and saved it as an intermediate AIFF file with the same settings.
I then processed that file by normalising it (which means adjusting the volume so that the loudest sound in the file is set to the maximum audio level possible), creating another intermediate file, and then compressing it to an MP3 file with a variable bit rate of 128kbps at 21,050Hz.
[Update 16 May 2014: Edited to reflect the fact that I’ve put the podcast production back a day.]
“At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we are open for business,” tweeted @bernieb last night, adding, “As I stand here on Anzac Cove, I’m reminded of just how terrible a place Australia was before I became Prime Minister.” An utterly crass scenario, no?
“Do NOT try to diagnose yourself on Wikipedia! 90% of its medical entries are inaccurate, say experts,” begins 
Careful and sighted readers will have noticed that in the photo accompanying 