It’s a Humpty Dumpty World

What do fitted sheets, service stations, long-life lightbulbs, life insurance, family law, and free installation have in common?

They are all the exact opposite of reality.

Governments, corporations, and advertising agencies who are faced with any predicament eliminate it by getting rid of the problem in the title.

So much so that every time a business says to me, as they often do, “not a problem” I know I’m in big trouble.

Those old enough will remember when service stations were called garages: an attendant filled your petrol tank, checked the oil, washed the windows, and pumped up the tyres.

Now you service yourself.

Which is why they’re called service stations.

Life insurance is actually the promise of payment after your death: so it is actually Death Insurance.

Which wouldn’t sell very well.

Even the police are in on the act. In my state of Queensland they used to be called the “Police Force” but now they are called the “Police Service”. But if you’re carrying guns, and tasers, and handcuffs you’re a force not a service.

One to be reckoned with.

The way it is now, you can’t even go to the supermarket without words being used against you.

Woolworths advertise themselves as “the Fresh Food People” whereas they’re much more than that. While they do sell lots and lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, they also fill their shelves with cardboard-packaged food like Kellogg’s corn flakes and 1 litre plastic bottles of Coke.

Indeed, until 2021 Woolworths were also the largest liquor retailer and the biggest pub poker-machine owner in Australia.

It owned BWS and Dan Murphy’s grog outlets and hotel gaming operations with more than 12,000 pokies.

This wasn’t a good look, so they spun these off into a different company: Endeavour Group where Woollies no longer hold any ownership. But the two entities still share loyalty benefits, supply chains, and logistics.

Plus Woolies runs Endeavour’s technology and inventory systems.

Not to forget the other part of Australia’s supermarket duopoly: Coles. Coles filled the TV air waves with huge red foam hands pointing down to the sound of “Down! Down! Prices are Down!”

Until an official inquiry found that they’d actually been putting prices “UP! UP! UP!” first.

The asterisk is the best thing that ever happened to advertisers. That way they can deny their own offer or warranty in infinitesimal print at the bottom.

Remember when mobile phones were free*?

Large ads dominated newspaper pages with the heading $0 … followed by a sequence of asterisks qualifying the offer. So much so that — big surprise — they weren’t free at all.

The asterisks were in the following sequence:

Asterisk *

Dagger †

Double dagger ‡

Section sign §

Parallel bars ‖

Pilcrow ¶

Since the world went digital, the telecommunications industry has ubiquitously offered “free installation” for all their complicated esoteric products. But what they are really saying is “install it yourself”.

Of course it’s free! You’re doing it!

Our only defence against this onslaught is to act like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass where Humpty declares to Alice: “words mean whatever I choose them to mean”.

That is, if we don’t look for our own meaning in the words, we’ll be the White Rabbit. Or, worse, the Mad Hatter.

As Humpty Dumpty would say — that is, if he were still in one piece — “Read everything the reverse of what is said”. (Humpty sat on the wall, but he didn’t sit on the fence.)

And nor should we … once we realise that:

.Solicitors who practise “Family Law” are actually offering “Family Divorce”

.The “freeway” inevitably ends up clogged with cars

.Self-regulation (especially of casinos) means a free-for-all

. A “self-managed super fund” will require you to hire an accountant, an auditor, and a manager

Which is precisely the way we ended up with “all-weather tennis courts”.

I’ve played tennis for 70 years. Back when tennis courts were made of granite, or clay, or ant-bed, or grass they were still playable after a shower of rain because the water was quickly absorbed into the court.

But a sprinkle of rain on an “all-weather” court sits on the surface and makes it unplayable.

Let’s face it, our language has become so twisted and mangled that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put it together again.

It took me until I was 28 before I realised that the Humpty Dumpty of my childhood was so smart.

I was the Reuters correspondent in Indonesia.

The Dutch and the Indonesians had been at war because both claimed the former Dutch New Guinea — the western half of New Guinea (the second-biggest island in the world).

The United States quickly intervened to establish peace talks.

It was agreed in New York that an “Act of Free Choice” would be held in West New Guinea in 1969 under UN auspices. In this way, the 800,000 Papuans could decide their own future: become independent, or a part of Indonesia.

In the meantime, for seven years, Indonesia would administer the territory.

“Act of Free Choice” is a phrase which sounds excellent and simple: unless you are Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty would have predicted, correctly, that there would be no ballot boxes, no secret ballot, no one-man-one-vote, and no meaningful intervention from the UN.

Just plenty of Indonesian soldiers.

Which meant the choice for the Papuans was plain: vote in favour of being part of Indonesia, or else.

I was in West New Guinea for five weeks while it all happened and it turned out to be — as you’ve probably guessed by now — an “Act of No Choice”.

That was when I realised why the Democratic Republic of East Germany and the Democratic Republic of North Korea insisted on having the word “democratic” in their name.

Because they were one-party totalitarian states.

After that I started keeping a file on these contradictory words, but ended up with a tin chest under my house filled with examples.

Too many for an article, or even for a book.

So a few years ago, that collection was acquired by the Queensland State Library as part of my archive.

I had hoped that when that box of paradoxes went out of my house and into the library, my Humpty Dumpty obsession would vanish.

But contradictions still keep flying in my direction like the playing cards in Alice in Wonderland.

Recently — stuck behind a huge semi-trailer on a narrow road in the rain — I noticed a permanent metal sign on the back: Trucks Keep Australia Moving.

Actually they slow us all down.

Then, driving to the Gold Coast, I put my new car in “cruise control” but soon found it wanted to speed ahead relentlessly whenever I needed to slow down.

“It should be called ‘out-of-control’,” my wife said drolly.

Helen knew Humpty’s lesson: give words your own meaning!

This was something she’d learnt while editing books back in the 1980s, a time when hardback editions were carefully and lovingly stitched together. That is until someone came up with a cheaper method: glue.

Glue, of course, didn’t work anywhere near as well, so the books tended to fall apart.

How to get rid of this problem?

Of course!

They called this new process “Perfect Binding”.

Mobile phones are a huge advance: very convenient to interrupt anyone you like while held up in peak hour traffic or sitting bored in the dog park. But, on the other hand, the arrival of the mobile meant that anyone could contact you at any time of day or night!

Especially scammers or cold callers.

To get around this problem of there being no escape, the mobile phone industry adopted the slogan “Be Free!” … accompanied by a young woman with mobile hooked over her jeans as she sashayed past expensive shops.

Not free at all.

And now, 2026, as the world plunges into war (the United States v. Iran; Russia v. Ukraine) it’s more important than ever to create our own meanings from the words we are fed.

First there was the “Coalition of the Willing” which came about because some European countries didn’t want to get involved in Ukraine. Then there was the “Memorandum of Understanding” which was misunderstood by both Iran and the U.S.

Luckily, I could read these slogans in reverse.

The “Coalition of the Unwilling” and the “Memorandum of Mis-understanding”.

Humpty Dumpty would be proud of me.

*Funny that these free mobile phones now cost more than $1,000.

David Mackintosh illustrations © profuselyillustrated.com