In America people generally refer to swag as we do to merch. Swag is the hats and beanies with corporate logos that every company encourages its employees to wear. This led us to wonder where swag came from.
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This week in a presentation on Australian Slang I was asked how it was that so many of the younger generation, including young women, used the f-word freely in a way that shocked the older generation but didn’t seem to trouble them in the slightest.
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The word quilter appears in the English Dialect Dictionary with the meaning ‘anyone or anything very large: a “whopper”’. It lists Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire as dialects which had this word.
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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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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.
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It 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.
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The 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.
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Have 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.
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My choice of Word of the Year for 2023 is generative AI. This is the latest killer app that will affect us all.
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You 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.
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The 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’.
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In 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.
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A 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’.
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When 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.
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As 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.
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The 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’.
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It’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.
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A reader spoke up for maggoted as her all-time favourite for Word of the Year while wondering ‘what wit thought that one up’.
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The 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.
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I 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.
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