Leon the Huguenot muses briefly on the days when television journalists were less educated.

Raw sewerage

Many years ago, while partly slumbering through a news broadcast from a commercial television station, my attention was suddenly drawn by the reportage of a Murray Flood.  The breathless female narrator, rightly impressed by the scale of disaster that had overtaken one particular town, said that large quantities of raw sewerage had been washed into the Murray. 

I watched with rapt attention, thinking I would see long lengths of earthenware and PVC pipe being swept along by the torrent (well, the earthenware pipe would have gone straight to the bottom).  I wondered just what raw sewerage could look like; would it appear like a newly extruded pipe from the factory?            

The video of the flood (almost always called inundation in television parlance) zoomed in on the water – no pipes there. There was just sewage with just a glimpse of a set of false teeth which, according to a universal law, always accompanies sewage. If you don’t believe this, asked the local sanitary people how many sets of false teeth mysteriously transmigrate through their pipes every year.  This is population movement of epic proportions – akin to the diaspora of Huguenots in the sixteenth century.

So the commentator had confused sewerage with sewage (the singer not the song?).  This was in the dark days before commercial television stations required all their commentators to have advanced degrees in grammar, writing and semantics.  Now, of course, even the most basic football commentary is given in perfect, grammatical English; well, that was the intention.

Now, of course, no commentator would confuse sewage and sewerage; the very thought is laughable. Thank heavens for first-rate public education.