Speccie reader (Joshua) asks about the expression ‘unrealised capital gains’ and in particular that worrying adjective. Well, ‘unrealised’ has been part of the English language since around 1767. It comes from the shorter word ‘unreal.’ The much older word ‘real’ goes back to the 14th century and means ‘having actual existence’. Hence, it’s opposite, ‘unreal’, means having no actual existence. So ‘unrealised’ capital gains are capital gains that have no actual existence – money that does not actually exist. That is why (following Joshua’s demand that I use plain words) I call this ‘pretend’ money. Under the new law proposed by Treasurer Jim Chalmers the Australian Tax Office will be able to make up a figure based on their own calculations (or imaginations) that you might have made if you had sold an asset. And then pretend that you have sold it, and made the amount of money they are pretending you made. And then charge you 30-per-cent tax on that pretend money. If you think this sounds immoral – you are quite correct. The real problem, of course, is that if the government gets aways with taxing this pretend money, it will then start to spread the idea all over the Tax Act until they are taxing ‘pretend’ money from everyone, every year. In this way there will be no limit to how much tax they can raise. That, of course, is the whole point of this exercise – to make taxing non-existent ‘pretend’ money part of how the Australian tax system works.

I heard it again recently – a news report about a ‘collision’ between a car and a tree. I was reminded of an old journalist who insisted that ‘collision’ could only be used if both objects were moving. If only one of them was moving, he would insist, it was not a collision. And he’s not the only one. As recently as 2015 the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage insisted that ‘only two objects in motion can collide’. In fact, this is one of the most persistent myths in journalism—that ‘collision’ can’t be used when a car, travelling at high speed, hits a tree (which was just standing still, minding its own business). In fact, the most confident (or smart alec) journalists will insist there’s another word that should be used instead— ‘allision’. And they are perfectly correct that ‘allision’ has been used (since 1615) to mean ‘the action of striking something against something else’. Mind you, if we wrote a story about the ‘allision’ between a car and a tree we would confuse most of our readers. But this whole war against the honest little word ‘collision’ looks a bit suss to me. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary insists that ‘collision’ means: ‘The action or an act of colliding with or crashing into something or someone’ – and that certainly covers the car hitting the tree. The Oxford adds that in later use ‘collision’ is used to mean ‘an accident involving a moving vehicle colliding with or crashing into another (moving or stationary) vehicle, object, etc’. Notice that it says, ‘moving or stationary’. And the great American dictionary, the Merriam-Webster, agrees, saying ‘collision and collide are commonly used to refer to such matters as a ship striking a stationary object, and there is nothing incorrect about such use.’ So I think it’s time those old journos stop nagging the trainees about this one.

Speccie reader Keren writes to complain about the use of ‘scramble’ in the context of rescues. After a natural disaster, she writes, ‘people are always scrambling to rescue survivors’. And she just has a feeling in her water this is the wrong verb. She’s right. ‘Scramble’ is wrong. All the dictionaries seem to agree that the action of ‘scrambling’ incorporates notions of ‘haste’, ‘disorder’ and ‘confusion’. Rescue teams, on the other hand, often operate in ways that are well organised and systematic. You can scramble eggs, but not rescues. It is a lazy journalistic cliché.