Human Nature – Page 8

12 August 201326 August 2020

Why people who say “train station” sound stupid

I cringe when people talk about the “train station”. “It’s ‘railway station’, you morons,” screams my brain. Well as it turns out, they’re actually not stupid — at least not for that reason. It’s just another relatively modern shift in language.

The chart at the top of the post is a Google Ngram search of their entire English corpus since 1820 — the first public steam railway in the world was the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825 — comparing the usage of “railway station” (blue) versus “railroad station” (red) and “train station” (orange).

You can click through to the full-size chart, or run the search yourself.

As you can see, the most common usage has almost always been “railway station”, with “railroad station” distinctly second-place. A “train station” wasn’t even a thing until the 1950s, but it rose in popularity quite quickly. “Train station” has been the most common usage since the mid-1990s, although it has been declining again since around 2000. I wonder why.

My understanding is that many railway terms derived from the military, because until the railways came along nothing else had been organised on that sort of trans-national and even trans-continental scale except armies. Hence trains have “guards” for their safe operation, and “stations” along the line where staff are stationed to maintain the entire railway system — including fuel, water, trackwork and signalling.

Railway stations are therefore part of a railway’s entire operation, not merely “train stations” for trains to stop at. For me, someone talking about “train stations” is showing their ignorance of how railways work: it’s more than just the trains.

Since I had the Google open in front of me, I thought I’d look at the variations in US versus UK English. It seems that “railroad station” isn’t the dominant American usage that I’d imagined.

Continue reading “Why people who say “train station” sound stupid”

08 August 2013

Why are corporations so paranoid, Telstra?

With all their constant worrying about whether people would recommend them or not, like this example from Telstra, I’m starting to think that most big corporations are paranoid psychotics — and not in a good way.

The other day I conducted a perfectly routine transaction at a Telstra Shop. I cancelled a mobile broadband service and replaced it with a different one. As with many businesses, my visit was followed up with a brief survey, “Please tell us how you feel.”

There were four questions, but none of them actually asked me how I felt:

Is your new Telstra service working? If you answer ‘no’ to this question, we will present you with options to get in contact with Telstra to resolve your issue on the next page.

OK, that’s fair enough. You need to know that the customer has a working broadband service. But the other three?

When you consider all aspects of buying and connecting your service — how likely are you to recommend Telstra to a friend or colleague?

Thinking about your in-store experience, how likely would you be to recommend the store to a friend or colleague?

What are the most important reasons why you gave us this score?

Guys, this goes way beyond “Does my bum look fat in this?” This is self-obsession. “What are you going to tell people about us? Why, what did I do?”

These constant questions about likelihood of being recommended are a sign of paranoia. I don’t care how you feel, I gave you money. Recommending you or not just isn’t a KPI for me.

How about you ask questions that reflect the customer’s needs and aspirations? Or even just concrete questions about how long I had to wait, whether staff were polite, or whether the service meets my needs?

04 July 201326 August 2020

My fish are dead: the black dog ate them (an explanation?)

[This blog post ended up being too long and way too pointless. It was meant to be a simple statement that I’ve just been diagnosed with a depression disorder again â€” the black dog being a familiar visitor, of course, but recently more seriously, so I wanted to tell friends and colleagues why things might have seemed a bit erratic â€” but it took on a bizarre 1000-word life of its own. So that’s the main facts dealt with, right here in the preface. But do feel free to read the post â€” provided you’ve got nothing better to do with your time. Or you like cartoon fish.]

Depression is such an ankle of a thing, and it’s a thing that I’ve got. “Ankle”, you ask? Yeah, it’s an old Australian expression, one that has even been discussed in the NSW Supreme Court. Yes, Depression is an ankle of a thing. It’s three feet lower than a cunt.

That’s certainly set the tone, hasn’t it, boys and girls!

It’s been that kind of a week. Or two weeks. Or a month. Two months? Longer? Yes. Two and a half years, actually. Maybe even longer than that. I really don’t know.

So here’s the story…

Continue reading “My fish are dead: the black dog ate them (an explanation?)”

02 May 2013

Talking Facebook’s decline, maybe, on ABC 774 Melbourne

Is Facebook on the decline? For some reason or other, I ended up talking about that on the radio on Monday afternoon.

The reason was actually this story in The Australian about “Facebook fatigue”. While I’m not sure that Facebook fatigue is a thing, I had a pleasant chat with journalist and presenter Raf Epstein — and here’s the audio.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.0MB)

23 April 201326 August 2020

Football fixes terrorism, says Australia

Boston could have been spared a lot of grief last week if Americans had just paid more attention to football — at least if the wisdom of attorney-general Mark Dreyfus here in sports-loving Australia means anything.

Here’s what Dreyfus (pictured) said on Channel TEN’s Meet the Press on Sunday, part of an interview which pondered whether the Boston bombing was a “wake-up call” for Australia:

[T]his goes to your question about what is sometimes referred to as lone-wolf, or people who are disconnected from any organised group — we’ve got a very large program that’s directed at countering violent extremism.

And that’s about working with communities. That’s about working with community leaders; it’s about getting young men out on the sporting field, getting them out playing soccer, playing footy, playing rugby, because that’s where we want them — not sitting at computer screens looking at videos about jihad.

None of this faggoty basketball or tennis for Freedom, no Sir! It’s all proper, manly and not-at-all-homoerotic football!

What about swimming, one of Australia’s most successful sports? No, that’s obviously out because beards and turbans and water resistance. And rowing? Hell no! They had a boat in Boston, and you saw what happened!

Sigh. Is this 1954 again?

“Sitting at computer screens” — always portrayed as a passive, dull-minded activity because, presumably, politicians never use their own computers for creating or interacting, so they never see them as anything more than TVs with dangly bits — versus the traditional, healthy outdoor and above all Australian pastime of blokes group-kicking an inflated pig.

Do politicians not understand that for a significant proportion of us, the mere idea of government-encouraged team sportsball with a bunch of boofheads makes it more likely that we’ll wash the curry out of the pressure cooker and fill it with nails?

Do politicians not understand that if young Mohammed has an interest in physics and chemistry, and is used to researching stuff on the internet, that he might have the potential to be a useful part of — oh, what’s that phrase again? — oh yeah, the “digital economy”, rather than being just another suburban also-ran with his nose shoved up some hairy bloke’s arse in a scrum?

Maybe he could even become part of this cyber thing we keep hearing about — the good part, not the part involving kindergarten kids and trousers around the ankles.

Deep breath.

I’m sure — or at least I’m hoping — that our nation’s programs to deal with violent extremism are just a tad more sophisticated that the Attorney-General makes out. He’s new in the job, and maybe he hasn’t been properly briefed yet. I might ask around. If it’s OK with you, Attorney-General, I might sit in front of a computer screen while doing that.

But I’d have thought that when you’re reassuring the public after a high-profile terrorism incident overseas that your message could be a bit better crafted than “Yeah, we’ll get â€™em playing footy, that’ll sort â€™em out.”

And before you ask, girls don’t do terrorism. What even are you thinking?

08 April 2013

Talking downloading TV on ABC 105.7 Darwin

ABC logo The new series of Game of Thrones was released in the US last week, and even though it was broadcast in Australia on pay TV network Foxtel just two hours later, it was still torrented to buggery. Just how entitled are we?

I ended up discussing this very issue with Kate O’Toole on ABC 105.7 Darwin, and here’s the full audio of our conversation from 4 April 2013. Since I’m way behind schedule, I’ll leave this stand without further comment.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.2MB)