The column that has fun with the smaller mistakes and missteps of Australia’s mainstream mediocre; that pays homage to those sweet little fishes that individually don’t amount to a full meal but collectively can cause a tummy upset over the overall state of the once great and noble craft of journalism in this country.

When the washed-up, bitter, old hacks who compile this column were but fresh-faced tyros starting out in newsrooms around this broad, brown, land of ours, one of the first things they were taught was never to say “old adage”.

If any reporter starting their careers back then used it twice, editors generally suggested perhaps a career change would be in order unless they preferred to be taken outside and bashed senseless.

“Old adage” of course was the last millennium’s forerunner to ATM machine and PIN number.

So what did we hear David Speers say this morning while plugging his Insiders program on ABC Weekend Breakfast. That the notion that if a political party has to explain something, it’s losing the argument, was a …. drum role please … an old adage.

As this column and its more serious sibling Media Glass House have admitted on many occasions, the English language is a moveable feast and it’s just possible that in that vast period of time since our compilers lived in houses that had an ice chest and they listened to Hop Harrigan at night on the radio, perhaps a division has emerged between old and new adages.

Still, where would be the fun if we had to accept that and not have a dig at our old mate Speersy?

He is, after all, the ABC’s national political lead. Or is that now lede?

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And here’s one we’ve spotted recently among the regular fuckups that occur … oops, sorry … happen in those news straps at the bottom of our TV screens.

Bad. Ban. Really, what’s the dif?

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And we’ve just heard someone in The Bug’s Mediocre Bytes mezzanine wing say this after watching Insiders: “Doesn’t Clare Armstrong now work for the ABC? She sounded a bit like she was a Liberal Party researcher.”

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