It is astonishing how old some ideas are and how they linger on as an undercurrent of contemporary thought. There are undoubtedly people who still believe the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary. In language there are assumptions that, though scorned by linguists, nevertheless survive in popular thinking.
Read MoreIt has constantly surprised me that historians seem to take very little notice of the features of the language in the texts that they look at. I did consider enlisting their support and help for the dictionary but I discovered that they were curiously blind to features of Australian English, even when it affected their own understanding of history.
Read MoreThe Tower of Babel is a powerful story — human arrogance brought low by divine retribution. If we had not attempted to reach God we might all have been speaking the same language.
Read MoreHave you ever experienced the feeling that a word is losing its meaning? When you say a word over and over, the meaning seems to fade with each repetition until the word is just a set of jumbled sounds, signifying nothing.
Read MoreMy choice of Word of the Year for 2023 is generative AI. This is the latest killer app that will affect us all.
Read MoreYou may have thought of the dictionary as a cold and unfeeling place where rationality rules but every so often I am reminded that people have uses for the dictionary that the editors never intended.
Read MoreThe current fashionable phrase I’m picking up what you’re putting down has its roots in the expression from British underworld slang to put down meaning ‘to make something very clear’.
Read MoreIn Australia it is fine to be one of the elite of the sports world but anywhere else it is most likely to be held against you. This use of elite as a smear word is a very Australian thing.
Read MoreA correspondent presented me with this word, commenting that he liked it but there were not many instances of its use — yet. I’m not talking about the rather quaint use of embubbled to mean ‘feeling the euphoria that follows drinking champagne’ but rather the embubbled that means ‘restricted to a group which shares enthusiasms and information to the exclusion of everything else’.
Read MoreWhen an explorer enters a new terrain with astonishing new features in the environment, they need to find the words to apply to what they have discovered. When the world enters a new situation, such as a pandemic, the expansion of our collective vocabulary to meet it is inevitable.
Read MoreAs China takes up more and more of our attention we are learning more about its ways. The Two Sessions is an event in China’s political calendar which warrants such a focus.
Read MoreThe Sydney Pride weekend produced an interview with a drag king. I had never heard the term but Macquarie Dictionary has it — ‘a person, especially a woman, who dresses as a male, often adopting an exaggerated style of masculine clothing and behaviour, usually for the purposes of entertainment’.
Read MoreIt’s that time of the year when all the dictionaries announce their Word of the Year. I have reviewed my own collection of words for this year and my first impression is that we had a relatively dull year. A slight greyness over everything.
Read MoreA reader spoke up for maggoted as her all-time favourite for Word of the Year while wondering ‘what wit thought that one up’.
Read MoreThe word hooligan was borrowed into Russia at the start of the 20th century for any crimes committed randomly by peasants against the aristocracy and the Church. Hooliganism was crime with attitude. It demonstrated resistance to authority.
Read MoreI was asked by a subscriber to this blog if there was a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have widow for the woman who has lost a husband, and widower for the husband who has lost a wife, and orphan for the child who has lost their parents, but nothing, it seems, for the parent who has lost a child.
Read MoreThere is an idea related to speciesism (our prejudice against creatures other than the human race) that the language we use allows us to regard animals as lesser beings. It follows the argument for non-sexist language that we should change the way we speak to change attitudes.
Read MoreCollective nouns have a fascination for us. The collective noun is the name we give a group of things or animals or people. There is one fish, but a school of fish for the many. One starling but a flock of starlings. Ever since the first collection, The Book of St Albans, was put together by a prioress, Juliana Berners, in 1486, we have been attempting appropriate and, we hope, catchy additions.
Read MoreNow you may wonder why I am writing about an obscure word of the New Forest dialect in the UK. It is a departure from the concerns of Australian English I admit. But a friend mentioned it as a word to enjoy and I agreed.
Read MoreI noticed that in amongst all the more formal descriptions of Scott Morrison, after it was discovered that he had been acquiring ministries in secret, was the term dodgy. I thought it was good that an Aussie word like dodgy was still part of the conversation so I checked it in the Australian National Dictionary — and there it wasn’t.
Read More
