Stuff Up Special Edition

Crikey; you can learn so much from the newspaper.

I cannot understand the accelerating circulation decline of the Dominion Post. The latest ABC audit has it at an annualised rate of minus 14.2%, yet you can be so enlightened by opening its pages. You can learn, for instance, never to have an idiot reporter interview a pretentious academic because this train-wreck of falsehoods and fallacies is the result:

Oh, my giddy aunt: the colours of the rainbow are “fictitious” and Isaac Newton “created” orange and indigo, in an act of “snobbery” (I’m extremely surprised he wasn’t accused of being racist). He was just “showing off” and they were “recent innovations” despite the fact that greenhouses, originally called ‘orangeries’, had existed for well over a hundred years before Newton was born. Also, the formidable House of Nassau adopted the name and colour, becoming the ‘House of Orange’ in the 1570s, well before Isaac Newton’s father was even born.

As for ‘indigo’, that was even more recent having only been introduced to Britain with the Viking raiders about 800 years before the brilliant scientist. The name itself was recent too, having passed from the 2,000-year-old Greek word for things ‘Indian’ – indikon, to Roman ‘indicum’, before eventually into the English ‘indigo’.

So, yeah; recent, fictitious, show-off, snobbery. A perfect description of today’s offering in the Dompost.