I am greatly enjoying Moss Cass and the
Greening of the Australian Labor Party but this little skerrick on page 187 is
an example of something that gets my goat quite often. It’s in the field of
‘then-premier’, ‘then-wife’ etc but in a way, worse.
Nation Review went out of business in
the early 1980s. I know people who are sentient adults approaching middle age
who would never have known it. I see so little point in adding ‘now defunct’ as
a descriptor. It was a very influential magazine in its time (not really a
newspaper, by the way – a weekly (?) tabloid, in its later years an actual
small-format publication, maybe a monthly? With a colour cover).
I guess I feel that the ‘now defunct’
pinpoints not a failing in the authors of the Moss Cass book per se, but the
weird world of people’s extreme disengagement with history in the present century whereby all things may or may not exist simultaneously, so we had
better be careful. ‘Then-Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ just in case you suspect
that Hughes, who died in the 1940s I think, is still Prime Minister Billy
Hughes. Is this a gripe worth expressing? Whatever, as I’ve said before, my
blog my rules.
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