This week there's more action on the Art Gallery's old joanna, and good news for CDs but, before that, an important rescue mission.

They say the first casualty of war is truth; it seems that the first casualty of politics is grammar.

Actually, given the state of the sides of our roadways, littered with unavoidable faces and slogans, the first casualty of politics is aesthetics. But that's not my beef today. Those political types have been trashing the English language again and we're here to call them on it.

I can forgive a lot. Since this 'Dirty Politics” story has broken I've forgiven the television news nightly for having reporters that are – for some reason – 'across” their stories. Across? They're across everything at the moment – across developments, across updates, and across every story there is. Do I even need to point out that this latest grammatical mangling makes no real sense?

Add it as another leaf on the growing bonfire of Insults to English. In a spirit of reconciliation I've let them all go. Except one. The highest crime, in the eyes of anal-retentive pedants (a group whose paid-up membership card I'm happy to flash), is to take a perfectly innocent English word, preferably one that many people aren't absolutely entirely definitely sure of its exact meaning, and use it to mean something different.

You may possibly have heard the following phrases on the news in the past week or so: 'I absolutely refute those allegations”; 'She said she strongly refuted the accusations”; or 'They both absolutely refuted the charges”. What are we to take from this? One can only assume that the people doing the refuting are actually unaware of the meaning of the word, because...

...well, because what refute means is to 'prove a falsity or error” or to 'rebut by argument”.

You can't just stand up and say 'I refute that”, because you haven't. To refute something you actually have to offer evidence, an argument, proof, that whatever you're refuting is wrong. What these politicians mean is that they 'deny” it. However frequently you say 'refute” doesn't matter: saying the words is just denying it – you haven't refuted it.

OK. Let's end this month's community service to the English language and move onto music.

The bright red piano currently hogging the limelight at the centre of the Tauranga Art Gallery gets another work-out next weekend when alt-country singer/songwriter Reb Fountain comes to town. That's on Saturday, September 13.

Alt-country singer/songwriter Reb Fountain is coming to town on Saturday, September13.

Reb's been to Tauranga a couple of times over the years. She toured as part of a duo with (ex-Shortland Streeter) Johnny Barker and again with Christchurch band The Eastern, and was really impressive.

She has a bag of great songs and a terrific voice and is very engaging live, telling a good story and bewitching audiences.

Reb came here from California at a young age. She's played in bands in Dunedin and Christchurch, studied jazz singing in Seattle and lived in New York and London. She's released two albums, both very accomplished (the second one, Holster, is particularly worth checking out) and has a new one due any time.

As I mentioned, she's playing the Art Gallery's big red beast, the piano with the longest name in the world, which takes up so much room that ticket numbers are limited to 65. Those tickets are $25 and the show kicks off at 7pm.

And onto some odd news from the world of physical music. That's what they're calling it now, as opposed to digital music. News out of England is that high-street music retailer HMV is close to wresting the title of UK's biggest music and DVD retailer back from Amazon as Britons rediscover the charm of actually going into a shop and buying a CD or a record. This is even more remarkable since HMV went bust 18 months ago.

Its new chairman Paul McGowan says the commonly held view that digital music was killing the physical 'was never true”. Sales at HMV stores have increased nearly 14 per cent in the past two months, including a 21 per cent increase in sales of CDs and vinyl records. For many reasons that warms the old-school cockles of my heart.