In an editorial on the thousands of submissions to Parliament on David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, the NZ Herald wrote, “the issue has been discussed and debated around water coolers and…”.
What absolute nonsense!
Currently, my company owns over 1000 prime CBD office suites in Auckland and Wellington. They vary in size from multi-floor to smaller part floor units.
All are inspected weekly by our staff. Not one has a water-cooler in it. Furthermore, over my lifetime I’ve owned tens of thousands of office suites in New Zealand, Australia and Britain and have never seen any with a water-cooler.
My point is this is an American expression and is totally inappropriate to use outside of America, where office water coolers are common.
Readers may possibly think I’m being overly pedantic but I disagree as particularly with editorials, there should be no room for sloppy writing. Its presence casts a shadow over whatever point the editorial is making.
As an aside, New Zealanders have never been big on drinking water. The single exception was a period a decade back where for a few years it was voguish for fat girls to walk about holding a water bottle, but that’s now over.
We’re coffee drinkers which is why regardless of size, all of our suites include a kitchen unit.
14 Comments
The other exception to drinking water is rugby players. When I played it was quarter of an orange at halftime. These days, a rugby player needs a gulp of water every ten minutes.
Except for “Helen Clarke”!
Witnessed her while PM, at the Ft Lauderdale boat show, in official capacity, swigging from a water bottle every 2-3 minutes.
The memory sticks with me, how bad it looked!
Round the photocopier or printer would be more appropriate in this day and age .
Who gives a damn what the Nz herald publishes.That paper is no more than a woke biased waste of reading time with “red” so called journalistic .
It’s true, you can’t even swing a cat in America without knocking over a cooler.
Also, I wish to thank you in advance for the heads up regarding the inappropriate use of American expressions, outside of America.
Since moving to Arizona twenty five years ago, I find myself cussing and spitting a lot more than I used to.
Guess I’ll have to tone it down for the next two weeks, whilst I vacation (oops I mean holiday) in your quirky little country.
Don’t want no cultural misunderstandings during my visit.
Will anybody understand me if I ask “hey buddy can you spare a dime?”
A dime is a lot of money in NZ dollars with the exchange rate the way it is!! With the cost of living here at the moment, you’ll be lucky if anyone can spare a cent! Or sense, which is what the legacy media lack the ability to publish….
Trying to think what you would buy with a dime .. nothing here is that cheap!
To roughly quote Dylan , you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the dimes and times are a changing.
As if we haven’t got enough ‘Naf ‘ Americanisms here already, so to be swamped with them by the Herald speaks volumes for Kiwis.
The Herald has gone from a newspaper reporting issues to being quite left wing. They’ve started using the fictional Aotearoa for this country, their cartoons regularly pilloried the Treaty Settlements bill and they have articles about Maori wonderfulness, e.g someone with a tiny bit of Maori blood achieving something of little significance.
Fridge will be fine with me..
If youre lucky, some come with water coolers built in…
We use to own a commercial property that had a water cooler attached to the sink mixing faucet…thank god it was a tenant expense to fix it…
Anybody know if the yanks are ” moving forward ” like our journo’s are able to ?
.. anybody not moving forward ?
Sideways doesn’t count, thats just moving forward in a different direction eh !
Let us know how its done by passing on a note to a forward mover.
NZ journo’s ” time travellers choosing to move forward ” : WOW.
….moving forward.
About 6-7 years ago I was in Mannheim, Germany. A beggar asked;
“hey buddy, can you spare a dollar.”
Well, taking into account that the currency was the Euro I was surprised that he asked for a dollar. I thought for a moment and replied;
“Mate, this is your lucky day. Here’s $2”
I had remembered that I had NZD2 coin in my pocket.
The Kraut bludger walked away wondering what the hell he would do with a $2 New Zealand coin, next to the French border.
I also dislike the lazy use of American expressions, but would add that i doubt it gets discussed much. The office loudmouth will have their say and everyone else will avoid commenting for fear of being called a racist and winding up in front of HR.