Will the prime minister please stop using English terms and expressions in completely the wrong context?
Published:
July 16, 2013 at 4:44pm
Chris Cardona wasn’t wrong to over-rule the tender adjudication committee’s decision, he said this morning, because it was neither a tender nor a direct order.
It was a ‘halfway house’.
His choice of description was unwittingly appropriate in the current Through The Looking-Glass scenario. A halfway house is where people live for a while after being released from a psychiatric hospital or similar.
It is called that because it is ‘halfway’ between society and the institution in which they were incarcerated.
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The place is becoming mental.
The clowns are showing signs of exhaustion.
I think most of them are still stuck in a quarterway house while the leaders are still in the institution including the Mad Hatter himself.
They’ll never reach the halfway house… even though they fooled 36,000 people into it before last March.
18,000+ more voted means a 36,000+ swing. I much prefer to think in terms of the former, rather than the latter – it gives me hope.
Unfortunately the PM’s pandering to the xenophobic masses might actually mean that at the moment he’s enjoying a surge in popularity.
THAT is what is making me despair for our country.
Appealing to society’s least common denominator means appealing to the ignorant and, of those, we have many, including some who would not class themselves as ignorant by as defenders of the national interest (extremely narrowly defined).
Unfortunately, very many people take much longer to admit THEIR mistake.
I heard otherwise ‘reasonable’ people accepting the fact that at least Joseph Muscat has done more (Mintoffian tactics still strike a chord) than the PN on the immigration issue (even if for the wrong reasons).
It’s going to be a long, long five years and we have to live them day by day until enough people realise they were deceived by the sweet talk of change from 25 years of PN administration.
Muscat’s English is becoming more of an embarrassment by the day.
Muscat is the one who is becomining more of an embarrassment every day. I could forgive him his English – it’s probably the least of his many faults.
It must be his British sense of humour.
Yes, coming up, a public call for psychiatric services.
I can give him a couple of expressions in the public interest.
Well we heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.
My impressions are now confirmed, government is a half-way house. Half-way between a weak joke and a very bad joke..
Jista’ il-prim ministru jieqaf juza’ metafori u espressjonijiet ‘smell the coffee’, ‘halfway house’ etc li nahseb la Nenu, Cetta, Toni, Lina, Richielle u Brandon m’huma jifhmu jahasra.
But imagine how clever they think him to be!
Oh my god. A semi-literate for Prime Minister. Taghna lkoll.
Stamping his feet in a half-way house? Dangerous
“A halfway house is where people live for a while after being released from a psychiatric hospital or similar.”
In this case it is more likely a place where they stay for a while before being consigned to some institution.
The Prime Minister’s seems to be a legitimate use of the expression: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halfway%20house
[Daphne – No, it isn’t. In British English, halfway house has connotations of madness and of reintegration into society. That’s why native speakers never use the term unless they wish to be insulting or disparaging. It does not mean a halfway staging post. And even if he meant the latter, the metaphor is wrong. What Chris Cardona did is not ‘halfway’ between a tender and a direct order, but a different animal altogether: ministerial interference.]
What a clown!
Obviously a house-way house can only mean a house or institution for former prisoners or mental patients for a literalist.
[Daphne – Words have meanings, David. English is one of the world’s most precise languages, hence the absolutely vast lexicon. This is something which many people who grew up speaking only Maltese, as Muscat did, find it difficult to understand. Maltese is a language in which one word must serve several generic purposes. They think English is the same. Also, when metaphors are used, they must be apposite. So you would never use ‘halfway house’ to signify something between a direct order and a tender offer, because ‘halfway house’ does not have connotations of something that is neither the one nor the other but somewhere in between. It has connotations of people who cannot be immediately reintegrated into society. Another point: what Chris Cardona did is not ‘halfway’ between a tender and a direct order, but something completely different: ministerial interference.]
“People like to add words when they want to feel important” George Carlin
His true beliefs and intentions are out in the open now. Not that they weren’t there for everyone to see prior to his premiership, but sometimes people fail to see reality down their nose.
His antagonism to the European Union is massive.
Notice his stance when there were no translators present during his Maltese speech, a rehearsed reaction to what he knew where that would lead.
Same goes to his feet-stamping regarding the African migration issue. When he sees the EU flag he sees red. But the same flag is acceptable as a backdrop, because it gives an modern image.