Get used to it, Ian. We are fast reaching grunting and sign language as a means of 'communication'. Although I must say that you are naive in expecting the ex-sportspeople employed on radio and TV these days to speak well; sport and education don't really go together.

Ian Nance, one of those Latin students myself and others didn't mix with during school days. The cultured classes. Or myself the uncultured classes. Life is interesting. But in the end, we all of us, eat S* and breath just the same: But some live better than others, so Latin obviously assists in the progress towards riches which non-Latin users find, unless for a stroke of luck, difficult or impossible.

From this end of the S* tty rod, the ABC appears to have a few more problems than pronunciation issues. What annoys me mostly about the ABC is its lack of vision. Its news and current affairs coverage is abysmal. Biased and clouded with a one eyed view of the world through the rose tinted glasses of aboriginal affairs, homosexual agendas, and the F* labor party, with a smattering of anti American and blatant pro Chinese bias.
Apart from classical music which it excels at, its arts are the same mix of current affairs bias, but in art form.

So Ian, I guess you can ignore the above and smug off to watch the ABC television sports coverage. And if you worked there, you were part of the problem for the rest of us outside the world hub of biased media!

Personally I am sickened by the ABC's push on perversion and its often lying narrative rather than the tone of a sports reporter. To think billions of dollars of tax payer money is used for socialist regressive ideology.

Boorish, toffee nosed snobbery? And just a trogan horse for the usual buffoons who dislike true freedom of speech, and I know you know, who I mean? Ver non semper viret.
Alan B.

Ian. It is not a question of “ ‘Toffee’ accent" but intelligible speech. You can worry about “sports bogans” , and leaving to one side multicultural ABC TV, I get very frustrated by the poor quality of speech of announcers of ABC Classic FM. I have repeated requested that they announce distinctly the name of the composer and the work played.
Could this posting and the comments be drawn to the attention of Michelle Guthrie, ABC Managing Director, who in implementing “a major cultural and structural transformation” at the ABC, is provoking disaffection

Leslie
LESLIE

ABC Checkout Warns on Hearing Aid Purchases
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Jun 9, 2017 - ABC Checkout Warns on Hearing Aid Purchases. Had it up to Hear. Series 5 Episode 9 of ABC The Checkout examines hearing aids in ...

dd,
you may well eat S*. I don`t. Perhaps if you did mix with some Latin students you may not either.

This commentary would carry more weight if it was more correct itself.
For example:

"This is sometimes jokingly exampled "

That looks a little bit lazy to me.

There are others...such as the abandonment of "in which" to be replaced by "Where". And so we get this garrulous and awkward sentence:

"One such person was my Latin teacher who reinforced the understanding and use of this ancient language by devoting one school period each month to the exclusive use of Latin conversation where no or little English was permitted."
We can work it out. but it's not at all clear at first what the 'where' even refers back to.

I do share an exasperation with ABC News in which we so often get "he sunk out of sight" (instead of sank). Or "he swum (instead of swam). Let alone the fascination with the tedious hobbyhorses of the presenters, which might be Aboriginal issues, feminism in all its detail, some woman who is the victim of yet another awful man, etc.

Good luck with your comments to ABC FM which also seem to have been taken over by giggling, girlish and garrulous commentators lately.

I am bewildered by the response to grammatical corrections that I get from advertisers, academics, teachers, my family.... 'Get over it. Language changes'. Indeed it does but how many 'Australias' are there? It follows that " 'Australia' are four for fifty-three" is wrong, an ignorant use of English. Multiply this example of noun-verb agreement a million times a day!

They are not doing too well with spelling on their Facebook stories.

Northern Tasmania had 'their/there' wrong a couple of days ago... I am dyslexic and I picked it.....

For ateday...

“Eat S*it and breath” explained!

God has laid the simple foundation on which rests the existence of all life on his earth. Call it a motto if you will; it is to eat to S*it and to breath. All else falls at the feet of folly, for all men shall conform to its imperative or perish!

And also , syntactical expediency predicates "youse ABC" in preference to "your ABC". The final e correctly avoids making the o into O , the ou into ow or O but lengthens the u to U. The plural of you is satisfactorily elicited and who would quibble about possessive apostrophe youse' derived from Old English . In Middle English the es ending was generalised to the genitive of all strong declension nouns. By the sixteenth century, the remaining strong declension endings were generalized to all nouns and the 's form was also used for plural noun forms. These were derived from the strong declension as ending in Old English . Increasingly , Middle Australian youse' becomes youse's or yous's and the more efficacious users is used : users ABC or users' ABC. ABC's users indicates the proper proprietary projection from Queen's English > BBC> ABC .

One of the things that really used to annoy me about the ABC was the lack of effort in pronunciation.

One of the worst aspects was those silly little girls who were no doubt good at English & perhaps other languages at school, who today infest the ABC news departments, & now those of other broadcasters.

Mon Tizer, used to indicate that mining city in Western Queensland used to be very painful, before I finally gave up listening to the ABC at all. Now I find the commercial stations are full of the same silly little girls, or their blood brethren, meaning I have been forced to migrate to the net for my news.

It was probably the presentation of yet another story about "BRAVE" little Tom, Dick or Harry, who stubbed his toe, & required 2 stiches that forced me to look else where. Once news became as puerile as those dreadful morning chat shoes some women watch, there was no longer any point in watching.

Just in passing, why is it that these silly little girls all have such dreadful voices, & why don't the media require some elocution work by their presenters

For some strange reason there's a standard Strine. In UK, people in Scortlan can't follow warst carntry.

A timely and interesting article. Slovenly speech and writing do not constitute language change to conform with societal change, but rather are products of laziness and (worse) affectation and (worse still) affectation imported from America.

An ugly common speech affectation at present is the uptick at the end of each phrase making it sound like a question, with only the last phrase allowed to sound like part of a sentence. I used to think it was a Sydney affectation but it's common in America so is probably imported.

One place to hear good, normal, grammatical speech is in commentary during AFL football matches. No fuss, just normal spoken English.
(I'd except the deadly boring pre-game on-camera performances of commentators bragging to each other about their knowledge of games of yesteryear: the English is OK but the content is the pits.)

The ABC is a major distorter of language without offending against grammar and syntax but trashing the meanings of words in order to support an ideological mission: to protect the march of the Islamic cult. Thus the term "anti-racist" is used to describe protecting not any race but a religion. Dhimmitude is woven into the fabric of the ABC which deplores intolerance of the most intolerant major religion on earth.

"Race" and "religion" have totally different meanings. Race is protected from negative discrimination in the minds of virtually all today's Australians (as it should be) so use of the term to refer to a religion which is bigotry on steroids is an attempt to extend this linguistic truce imperceptibly to that religion. Watch out for it!

I can cope with the nasal delivery.
I manage with the accents.
I can tolerate the colloquial,but I find the lack of knowledge of simple grammar, deplorable, and as each class year graduates the knowledge becomes less and less.
I estimate that by 2020 we, who were educated in English grammar, will need interpreters to understand what is being said.