More reasons to hate the SMH

There are mornings when I wake up and want to club someone at the SMH. This morning was another of them.

Here is the first paragrap of this story, titled "Nine Diggers hurt in ambush" by their defence correspondent:

AN ambush of Australian troops in Afghanistan has left nine special forces soldiers injured - including one fighting for his life - in a battle that resulted in more casualties than any encounter since the Vietnam War.

Note that this "defence correspondent" used two words that soldiers would never use to describe being shot in battle - injured and hurt. The proper term is "wounded". You get hurt when you cut your finger when slicing carrots for dinner. You get injured when you are riding your bike and get hit by a car. But when you get blatted by the enemy, you are wounded. That's why we have terms like WIA, which stand for Wounded In Action. We don't have acronyms of IIA and HIA to describe Injured In Action and Hurt In Action.

What on earth did Jonathan Pearlman do before getting this gig? Was he a restaurant critic perhaps?

At least he got the term "casualties" right.

I don't know how the SMH can think that it is a serious paper when it gets simple things like this so very, very wrong. Like calling an APC a tank, or an AK47 a machine gun. Or calling an F16 a "warplane". If a figher aircraft is a warplane, what is an Airbus 340? A peaceplane?