Lexicographer at large
Lexicographer at large

Sue Butler AO

 
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LATEST BLOG

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Indian giving

My neighbour accused me of Indian giving.  This was because of my habit of inserting pot plants which I had managed to bring to the point of death in amongst her flourishing collection until such time as they had recovered at which point I took them back.

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New words

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dragon smut

We enter the world of paranormal romance and dig down from there into dragon shapeshifter romance.  The dragon shapeshifter can appear to be a normal human being but can then shapeshift as required into its dragon form. 

ZG: 5

Seems to be very popular!

flood the zone

This was originally an American sports expression used in football and meaning that a team filled a particular area of the field with players, either to draw the opposition into that zone and leave other areas open, or to defend with numbers.

ZG: 7

With an election coming we are on the alert for Tumpisms in speech and behaviour. This is one that has high frequency at the moment although the caravan may move on.

visual snow syndrome

This is a rare neurological condition which remains a mystery to medical practitioners.  The symptoms are visual disturbance often accompanied by brain fog and tinnitus.

ZG: 3

The sufferers are acutely aware of this name that has been recognised for their condition but it belongs to a niche area of medicine.

Usage matters

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optionality

A contributor noticed that one of Trump’s advisors claimed that Trump liked optionality.  She queried the acceptability of optionality.

wieldy

It is true that wieldy is a word that sounds very unwieldy but I was surprised to hear an ABC politics reporter using it in the sense of ‘awkward or difficult’.

autochthonous

A friend of mine met this word for the first time in a conversation and instantly fell in love with it. Having played around with what we could do with it, adding autochthonousness, autochthonously, and autochthoneity to the possibilities, and devising sentences of mouth-wrenching difficulty, I settled down to look at it more seriously.

Sue at TEDxSydney

"There are those who want the dictionary to censor aspects of language that they deem to be unsavoury or undesirable. But language moves on."

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Sue on the ABC's The Link

"I think with blasphemy you are actually going back to the 1600s where if you took the name of God in vain, that would produce the kind of strong reaction that we have to taboo words today.

Those sorts of taboos are losing their force and the F word, I think, would be regarded as still an emphatic colloquialism, but a colloquialism, not a taboo word."