There is at the moment one definition of the quokka in the Macquarie Dictionary.

But we are about to have a second definition.

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I see this as a stab of lightning going from China to Russia. Morrison has chosen to follow the idea of having a snappy mantra as George Bush did with the Axis of Evil. I’m not sure that Arc of Autocracy has the same impact as Axis of Evil. Autocracy is a bit of a clunky word.

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The second word in our political lexicon for 2022 is nark which is defined in Macquarie Dictionary as ‘a complaining person’ and ‘a spoilsport’. In the Thesaurus spoilsport lines up with killjoy and wowser. Scott Morrison talked about the ‘narks … in the bubble’ who had ‘a crack’ at him for doing a spot of welding.

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I have never quite understood the claim to be ‘a living person’, sometimes ‘a natural person’, made by people who describe themselves as sovereign people. They have much the same beliefs as sovereign citizens but possibly favour the Magna Carta as their justification rather than the American Constitution or other American texts. They also feel that the term sovereign citizen seems to admit to a citizenship which they deny.

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Elections always throw up key words and phrases so lexicographers follow them with interest for both the politics AND the lexicon. But who would have thought that one of the first salvos in the election that is on everyone’s mind (though not officially called yet) would be the term Manchurian candidate.

ZG: 8

Possibly this will create a revival for the movie as we all try to work out what the term Manchurian candidate could mean in this Australian context.

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A number of the protagonists in the recent political dramas were claiming for the Liberal Party that it was a broad church – this in defiance of all the evidence to the contrary.

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