Nitpickin' Natarsha

The plight of the syllableaphobe.
Here it is three weeks from my last post, and all I seem to be able to do is pick on Natarsha Belling. But I can't help it. There's just so much material there.

This morning she was reporting the findings of the pathologist working on the case of Bob Woolmer, the captain of the Pakistani cricket team who was allegedly murdered during the week. Woolmer's injuries were found to be consistent with being strangled. According to Natarsha, he died of "aphyxia". Clever girl.

I have a handful of theories about Natarsha:

1. Possibly due to the narrowness of her mouth in its permanent pout, Natarsha suffers from syllableaphobia, where any word that appears to have more than a couple of syllables causes her brain to shut down. To compensate, she spits out any old string of phonemes as a reflex.
2. She has a rare disorder known as Cosonant Syndome, where consonants (such as the 's' in "asphyxia" and the 'n' in "an" are randomly dropped from speech.
3. Natarsha's real name is Natalie Smith, but she has trouble pronouncing it.

At least she doesn't suffer too badly from Headlinephasia, like Sandra Sully. The poor lass seems to be fairly economical with her conjunctions and verbs, preferring to speak like the front page of the Daily Telegraph (known to some people as a "newspaper"). One commonly hears Sandra introduce a story with a string of words such as, "A lucky escape; one man's horror road trip"; or, "Election news".

At first I thought Sandra's impediment was the fault of the Autocue copywriter, but Bill Woods doesn't seem to have any trouble forming complete sentences at 6 in the morning, so I don't see why it should be so difficult for the clothes-horses later in the day.

Hmmmm... perhaps I should not watch the news on Ten. But what else could I watch for entertainment?