First, though, is a ''scathing attack'' really scathing if it doesn't actually scathe its target? Can a ''blistering attack'' really be called such a thing if it doesn't raise any blisters?

Several times a week one learns from news and current affairs reports that someone newsworthy has ''launched a scathing/blistering attack'' on someone or something else newsworthy. One ''scathing attack'' that's been ''launched'' (for in journalism these attacks are almost always ''launched'' but are sometimes ''unleashed'' as if there can be no other modes of their delivery) in recent days has come from beyond the grave.

''One of the most respected figures in the Catholic Church,'' one reads in one online newspaper, ''has launched a scathing attack on his fellow clergymen in a last ever interview published the day after his death … He gave a scathing portrayal of a pompous and bureaucratic Church failing to move with the times.''

But can the Catholic Church possibly be scathed by the natterings of one now decomposing priest? The Catholic Church is a kind of enormous, pompous, bureaucratic rock, a kind of heaped-up Uluru of traditions, bigotries, superstitions and relics, off which criticisms like Cardinal Martini's surely ricochet like a lonely little hailstone bouncing off Uluru and then melting.

But of course these reported scathings and blisterings happen a lot here in Australia too. There was a flurry of them a few weeks ago when all the news mediums reported ''scathing attacks'' Wayne Swan had ''launched'' at Kevin Rudd. It is an extraordinary week in Australian news and current affairs when journos find no scathings, blisterings and witherings going on.

My point in making this mild-mannered attack on journalism's clichemongers is that these seem lazy, inaccurate way of describing these launchings since there is almost no one in Australian public life sensitive enough to be the slightest bit scathed, blistered or withered by anything ever launched at them.

Sensitive, poetic people (like this columnist and like this columnist's average, decent, suburban readers) are vulnerable but most of the public figures who are the targets of reported launchings simply aren't. The idea of someone with an ego like Kevin Rudd's (huge and craggy, like a mountain range of blancmange, or, towering and ornate and decorated with gargoyles, like Chartres cathedral) being scathed by anything gibbered in the media is ludicrous.

It is like the suggestion that a rhinoceros flinches when a snowflake alights on its armour-plated flanks. Similarly, the idea of scatheproof, blisterproof simpletons and troglodytes like Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard being scathed, blistered and withered by words and ideas is fanciful.

Perhaps journalists, especially columnists/commentators, hang on to this fancy because, deluded, they want to believe they have power to influence our leaders. It never occurs to me that Julia Gillard might read this column. With its smorgasbord of left-liberal, socialist, humane ideas, true Labor nuances, allusions to the fine arts and demandingly long words it is not pitched at Tory bogans like her. Meanwhile, this columnist isn't blisterproof and there have been attacks launched at me from Wagga Wagga after last week's column.

The Readers: Yes, we could see that coming, Ian. You can't poke fun at Wagga Wagga and get away with it.

The Columnist: Yes, I've learned that the hard way.

The Readers: As we recall you were deploring the conservatism of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra's concert programs for next year, saying it was an unsophisticated choice of undemanding music (not even any Berlioz, Sibelius or Handel, not a note warbled by a counter tenor, not a phrase of Mahler), more like the kind of thing the Wagga Wagga Symphony Orchestra might serve to the yokels of that town than what's appropriate for the people of a clever capital city.

The Columnist: Yes, that's about it. But as the people of Wagga Wagga have been quick to point out (and those of you who have graduated to this paper's swashbuckling, Canberra Times of the Future website have been able to follow) theirs is a bigger, better, more arts-conscious city than I, in my ignorance, understood. What's more, a Canberra champion of Wagga Wagga has written to this paper's editor to show that Wagga Wagga's adventurous local chamber orchestra tackles composers and works that the nervous, populist CSO wouldn't touch with a conductor's baton.

The Readers: We read online your grovelling but gracious apology to Wagga Wagga. We agree with you that the CSO's 2013 program of bogan music (Ravel's Bolero! God give us strength!) shows we are still, really, just a country town, but we think you should have picked a much smaller, dustier, more two-horse town for your analogy. Somewhere where the local hillbillies are unlikely to read a newspaper, let alone an upmarket column like yours.

The Columnist: Like Gympie?

The Readers: Yes, perfect.

The Columnist: Not Cooma? Or Goulburn?

The Readers: No, that would be asking for trouble.