3 weeks ago
12
Train nerds are getting restless in Melbourne. Counting down the hours until they get their chance to ride the city’s latest network, visit the brand-new stations Arden and Parkville. After seven years of underground boring, the really boring business of waiting has begun.
Confusion, too, since wangling an exact date from any politician is like prising a recipe from Colonel Sanders. Rather than time and place, we get news of soft launches or phased summer rollouts. Perhaps that’s a ploy to stagger the onrush of stickybeaks, or maybe it’s cabinet-speak for TBC. After seven years of digging, what’s another seven weeks of anticipation?
Katy Perry soft-launched her relationship with Justin Trudeau via an Instagram post. Credit: AP
Of course, another theory is linguistic fashion, since industry leaders and influencers are enthralled by all things soft and hard. Have you noticed? Word-nerd publican William Ryan certainly has, writing to report: “While negotiating a lease, one of the principals asked about ‘soft assets’. I pretended to know what he was talking about until I managed to Google after the meeting …”
For the record, soft assets are intangible. Think trademarks and patents, copyrights and goodwill. Hard assets, by contrast, are made of bricks and mortar: real estate, cars, your plasma TV.
Two clear baskets. Unlike soft launches, which only differ from the other by dint of their sketchy details, much like seeing a calendar in soft focus or adding -ish to any proposed date and time. Celebrity couples deepen the blur, dabbling in soft and hard relationship launches across social media. Here, a soft launch is ex-PM Justin Trudeau and pop star Katy Perry holding hands at a gala; compared with the tonsil hockey of a hard launch, the full clench and lip-lock as observed by J.Lo and Ben Affleck in their salad days.
Personnel managers preach the virtues of soft and hard skills, respectively the difference between empathy and knowing how to use Adobe. Websites insist both count in your job prospects. As for content censors, the distinction between soft and hard pornography is best summarised by one Quora user: “There’s plenty of nudity and sex in softcore porn but you’ll never see the hardcore close-up of uglies bumping.”
Loading
Across the density spectrum, many hard/soft categories are simpler to split. Ask a fussy diner about hard cheese or soft-boiled eggs. Consult a publican like William Ryan about soft drinks and hard lemonade. Another means of separating the two states is to reverse the idea. Tom Gleeson, say, could never host a show called Soft Quiz, just as SpaceX and NASA prefer soft landings versus the messier alternative encapsulated in Elon Musk’s wish, “I’d like to die on Mars, just not on impact”.
No less grisly, military wonks talk of hard bases (a launch pad protected against nuclear attack) and soft kills: neutralising an enemy without resorting to destructive force. Across the corridor, politicians exercise hard and soft power. Think iron fist over those loud shirts at CHOGM, hostile tariffs versus the happy-clappy earworms of K-pop.
Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, populariser of the soft-power concept in the early noughties, had a creepy way of phrasing it: “Many values like democracy, human rights and individual opportunities are deeply seductive”. Not exactly tonsil hockey, more a romantic version of statecraft. Picture two egalitarians sharing licks of a soft-serve cone on TikTok, or grazing kneecaps on the Parkville train – whenever that line happens to be open.
Get tips, tricks and word games from our crosswords guru, plus links to our online puzzles and quizzes, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Sign up for our Puzzled with David Astle newsletter.
