Tag: Phillip Adams

A personal story about hearing loss

dog-with-hearing-loss
Only people without hearing loss could ever use this means of communication.

Here is a story  about hearing loss from the early days of Friday on My Mind, January 16, 2013. Nothing much has changed in 12 years except to give those new to hearing aids a heads up – they need replacing at least every five years. My hearing loss took a bit of a dip in 2020 but that proved to be due to a physical ailment. Nevertheless I forked out a few grand for a new pair of hearing aids in 2023 and yes, they have a charging station. We still need the debate about a simple piece of technology that has just one function yet costs four times more than a laptop or tablet which can deliver, well, anything.

By Bob Wilson

This story begins with a famous pangram (a phrase using all letters of the alphabet) – The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. We’ll get back to that later.

When I went to the bedside cabinet drawer on Monday to change my hearing aid batteries, I had just two left (they last about 7 days). Next day I rang my service provider who said they would post some to me, as per the terms of their 12-month contract. Australians dispose of approximately 156 million lithium hearing aid batteries per year. That is a serious amount of lithium in the landfill. Some hearing aid manufacturers now sell rechargeable hearing aid pods (the batteries last for a year). It’s about bloody time.

It started off being wryly amusing. For years I thought Jimi Hendrix was singing, “S’cuse me while I kiss this guy”, (now the name of a website which chronicles mis-heard lyrics). Is Billy Joel really singing, “You made the rice, I made the gravy”? Does the line in Toto’s Africa sound like “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do?” Or Canada’s national anthem – “Oh, Canada, we stand on cars and freeze?”

After five years of asking people to repeat what they said and seeking refuge in my favourite three words – “What?’ “Pardon” or “Mm,” I had my hearing tested.

Six months into the quixotic world of hearing devices, I have mixed feelings; good days and bad days and also much for which to be thankful. Gone are the days when I thought my wife said “Hearty Elephant” when she actually meant “hardly relevant”. I could go on, but you hard of hearing blokes out there know about which I speak.

If you are losing the high frequencies (and we all do as we age), if it gets too bad you won’t discern between words like ‘list’ and ‘fist’, you will turn the TV up louder than your partner will like and you’ll avoid going out to places where people gather.

But hearing loss is not just a problem for older people. The Ipod generation and those who frequent dance clubs and rock concerts are at high risk of damaging their hearing. There’s a lot of difference between the 50 to 60 dB level of normal conversation and the 140 dB pumped out by some of the world’s big stadium bands.

Phillip Adams is one of the few mainstream writers who confessed in public to needing hearing aids. Adams canvassed themes with which I had become entirely familiar, through five years of denial and hogging the TV remote.

“I developed a preference for foreign films with subtitles,” Adams wrote in The Australian Magazine, December 2012, adding that he rather enjoyed the self-censorship which came with deafness “..allowing me to ignore a bombardment of banal conversation or unattractive views”.

BHA (Before Hearing Aids), we’d be watching the splendid US spy thriller Homeland (with subtitles) which might read “birds chirping” or “dog barking in distance”. I could not hear those sorts of noises at all. AHA (after Hearing Aids), as the audiologist warned me, flushing the toilet evoked memories of a trip to Niagara Falls in 2010. I no longer heard faint chirping in the Bottle Brush tree next to our front veranda – I could hear and identify honeyeaters, wrens, whip birds, cat birds as well as the sound of frogs and the creek gently running at the bottom of our block, 100m away.

They say it can take your brain a year to adjust to being able to hear high frequencies again. The audiologist patiently heard the problems I reported when playing guitar or whistling. I complained it sounded like an effects pedal and there was feedback and other unpleasant sounds. After some tweaking of compression and other frequencies, these problems diminished. Now I am finding the handiest thing about these devices is the volume button. I turn it down if people’s voices sound brassy and loud up close and up when, say, listening to a speaker in an auditorium. Oh and the wonderful music programme button – four-part harmonies and fiddle/mandolin solos never sounded so sweet.

The amazing thing, considering the estimated 1.45 million Australian who have hearing aids, is why there is so little dissent about the disproportionate cost. Even mid-range hearing aids can set you back $3,000 each and if your hearing loss is serious or your job depends on hearing every word, you’ll be in double that figure in no time. Meanwhile, you can go to a computer shop and walk out with the latest Mac laptop for less than $2,000 and enough computer power to run an international online business. Or you can use a smart phone’s GPS, telecommunications suite, camera, video, skype, email, internet access and hundreds of apps for no money at all. Just sign here and pay your bill every month.

While hearing aids fall into the category of a big ticket retail item, it pays to shop around. There are sales-oriented hearing clinics out there which will lure you in with a free assessment and then push you fairly hard to sign a contract.

I got assessed by a couple of private clinics then went with the Federal Government’s voucher system (for the over-65s), opting to pay for a “top-up”. My mid-range, programmable hearing aids (I have two) cost me $3,400 and the government paid the rest.

Choice magazine surveyed 525 people to find the main reason people get hearing aids is to overcome social disconnection and isolation. But half of the people interviewed had problems with their hearing aids and one is six were dissatisfied, so it is no simple fix.

Choice said people also shop around online, citing a member who was quoted $12,000 for a pair of top-end hearing aids and ended up buying online from a UK retailer for about $4,250. The retailer programmed the hearing aids according to his audiogram. The member later found a local clinic to service his aids for $100 to $200 per appointment.

There can be warranty issues taking this approach, but increasingly, older Australians are starting to add hearing aids to the list when they go to Thailand or the Philippines for dental work or knee replacements.

Whatever the options, I can say I’d rather have my hearing aids, imperfections and all, than go back to the muddy pond that was once my hearing.

Meanwhile, for those of you who do not (yet) suffer hearing loss, consider this. Occupational health and safety advocates nonprofitrisk.org says the permissible top limit for noise exposure over an eight-hour period is 90 decibels.  If you don’t know what that means, here’s a short list:

  • 80 decibels: city traffic, manual machine, tools;
  • 90 decibels: lawn mower, motorcycle, tractor;
  • 100 decibels: woodworking shop, factory machinery;
  • 110 decibels: chainsaw, leaf blower;
  • 120 decibels: ambulance siren, heavy machinery, jet plane on runway;
  • 130 decibels: jackhammer, power drill.

So if you’ll recall the pangram we cited in the first paragraph. If you’ve got moderate hearing loss, Australian Hearing says this is what you will hear:

__e _i_ brown _o_ jum_ed over _e _azy dog.

Scary isn’t it!

Friday on My Mind was a weekly column by Bob Wilson, published by Bob & Laurel Wilson Consulting Pty Ltd. You can now catch up on occasional post-2023 Digressions or troll the archives on this website.

 

 

 

Don’t verb that noun, my friend

verb-noun-grammar
Image: This clever, tongue-in-cheek meme has been doing the rounds on social media – creator unknown (but thanks)

It doesn’t take much to cause members of the Ancient Order for the Preservation of Proper English (AOPPE) to fly off the handle.

A misplaced modifier, a literal, verb confusion, homophonic confusion (a pear of undies) or noun-verbing will do it every time.

There are old phrases akin to ‘fly off the handle’ (to lose one’s temper), in Tony Maniaty’s memoir of a half-Greek kid growing up in 1950s Brisbane.

Maniaty employs sayings of the day like ‘stone the crows’, ‘drunk as a skunk’ and (the book’s title), ‘all over the shop’.  The latter means in every direction, in a disorganised and confused state. It’s a British sporting term, originating in the 19th century.*

I was thinking about this topic when realising how many erudite people read my weekly musings – authors, artists, academics, folkies, historians, lawyers, photographers, politicians, proofreaders, poets,  property developers, teachers, university lecturers…it’s a long list.

I’m impressed that they stick with me, given that every week, the SEO (search engine optimisation) programme in WordPress suggests that readability could be improved.

Most of us in the over-70 cohort, brought up on old-school grammar and spelling, will realise we are members of the aforementioned Order (which would, if it existed, have a lodge with disabled access, smoke alarms and a fire extinguisher, a white board and an urn for making herbal tea).

For this lot, spelling, grammar and syntax matters, as does punctuation, even when you overdo it, like I do; not that I make a habit of it – or end a sentence with a preposition, but.

You are certain to see members of the AOPPE emerge from the lodge clutching placards at the first sign of someone grumbling about the mangling of the English language. Let’s take just one example, a news report describing a group of people as ‘that’.

‘A group of concerned citizens that (who) did something’.

The more worrying thing about the Australian language in 2021 is that it so lacks the colourful sayings of my youth. There are examples aplenty in All over the Shop and Hugh Lunn’s memoir, (Over the top with Jim). They include choice phrases like ‘the cat’s got your tongue’ or   ‘you look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards’. We all knew what they meant.

In my newspaper days, a young colleague did me a great favour, to which I responded, ‘your blood’s worth bottling’. He, a double degree graduate of our best university, said “Excuse me?”

I explained it was a supreme compliment but he said he’d not heard the expression, which originated with young diggers on the Western Front (1914-18).*

Maniaty uses Australian-isms of the 1950s when describing Brisbane at a time when many of the city’s timber houses were 10 foot off the ground on wooden stumps. He appoints himself narrator – right from the moment of birth. It’s an amusing artifice, a four-year-old dispensing futuristic wisdom. He tells Dad he ought to make yoghurt in little plastic pots and sell it in the shop, like ice-cream.

Dad laughs “Who’d buy that stuff?”

“Not on your life,” says Mum, “that’s our recipe”.

By the bye, many scholars have tried to track down the origins of ‘stone the crows’. All agree it derives from Australia and fits nicely with other mild oaths such as ‘stiffen the lizards’. Most would agree that expressions like ‘strike me pink’ or ‘strike me up a gumtree’ don’t really mean anything. They are just mild versions of ‘s*** a brick’ or similar.

Phillip Adams lamented in The Weekend Australian, August 1996, that most of the slang words of his childhood had disappeared. Or at best they appeared only in Dad and Dave jokes, copies of the Sentimental Bloke or the Macquarie Dictionary. Check and see if he’s right (words starting with D): drongo, dill, dinki-di, dinkum, dole, dukes, dag, daks, decko, darl, dazzler and daisy-cutter (an obscure AFL term). How many of those 12 words do we use in conversation today? (2- Ed.)

Adams reckons there are 120 Aussie terms for inebriation (and 30 for vomiting). I recall one choice phrase: ‘talking to God on the big white telephone’ which manages to encompass both.

Tony Maniaty’s Mum had a couple of mild phrases to describe  drunken behaviour such as ‘drunk as a skunk’ or ‘full as a boot’.

The rollicking days of Bazza McKenzie not withstanding, our unique language has been infiltrated by Americanisms and the abbreviated ‘language’ of social media.

As Hugh Lunn said in the introduction to his collection of old Australian slang terms: “If we adopt the language of another society we lose the rights of memory in our own kingdom.”

Lunn amassed a vast collection of Aussie-ims from the 1940s and 1950s when writing his memoir, ‘Over the top with Jim’.

Later, he wrote amusingly about the vernacular in another book, ‘Lost for Words’ (which sold 40,000 copies). When I pulled this 2006 tome from the bookshelf, I found the Adams article, which I had been using as a bookmark.

Although I was born in the late 1940s, I confess ignorance of sayings in this book like, ‘It’s snowing down south’ (your knickers are showing) or ‘he’s all mouth and trousers’ (referring to a boastful person).

The misuse of the Queen’s English is another matter altogether. There are many instances like the one in last Saturday’s Weekend Australian), where the reporter or sub editor literally put his or her foot in it. They reckoned the takeover of ME Bank by BOQ was ‘no shoe-in”

My pet peeve (or bugbear), is when reporters and others use a noun as a verb. A classic example oft-used on TV news is ‘residents were impacted’. Ahem. They would only be impacted if they had an unfortunate bowel or tooth condition. The proper word is affected.

Grammarians refer to verbing a noun as denominalisation. This explains the process by which nouns (passive words), slink their way into the domain of doing words (verbs).

Instead of saying ‘why don’t you sell it on eBay” the noun becomes a verb – “Just eBay it.”

The BBC’s Brandon Ambrosino chose a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon to illustrate an article on noun-verbing.

“I like to verb words,” Calvin tells Hobbes. “I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs,” he explains, citing the word “access.” “Remember when access was a thing? Now it’s something you do.”

As Strunk and White’s Elements states:  “Many nouns lately have been pressed into service as verbs. Not all are bad, but all are suspect.”

So, whether your blood is boiling or worth bottling, you should not replace proper English expression with millennial nonsense like Dude!, Whatever, Just saying, LOL (laugh out loud) or OMG (which people of my era may think means Oh My Giddy Aunt).

As Adams wrote 15 years ago, “our verbal biodiversity is being replaced by the mealy-mouthed and mass-marketed.”

Strewth! Strike me pink, Bluey. You can say that again.

* www.wordhistories.net