As summer approaches I constantly hear media reports of things happening in Jan or on Jan, and I start wondering what that girl has been up to this time.

But paying closer attention to the reports on TV and the radio reveal they are talking about things happening on Jan 15, or Jan 21, and so on.

Are they now numbering off the different women named Jan, and if so where does my sister fit into all this?

Ah no, they're talking about dates, but the reporting has become so lazy and sloppy that none of them use the full word of January.

It is the same with February, which the reports constantly refer to as just Feb, as if the last five letters of the word just magically disappeared - sort of like a brown paper bag full of cash passed to a dodgy official.

But the shortening of February is, in a way, understandable, give the way so many people stumble over the first R as they mangle the word.

The abbreviations reached a ridiculous stage in recent weeks with reporting on the Oscars, and I heard a journalist talking about "noms".

"Oh no, she's got it wrong," I thought to myself.

"It was nums, birdie num nums, in the Peter Sellers movie The Party," I thought as I focused on classic movies because, after all, they were talking about the Oscars.

But no, "noms" actually referred to nominations, but the reporter seemed incapable of using the word.

And so here I am wondering if the TV and radio stations are hiring people with speech impediments that make it impossible to pronounce words of more than two syllables.

Or it is just that the shorthand style of text messages is continuing to creep into mainstream reporting?

Either way, it leaves an old bloke like me a bit confused.

And I think we need to stamp it out before stores about Sept, Oct, Nov or Dec start filling our news feeds.