Nothing like a good tug-of-war about what a term is going to mean to get us all interested. The term is fair-dinkum power.
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Geoffrey Rush has been taken to task by the barrister for the Daily Telegraph for saying that he felt that the newspaper had made him out to be a pervert.
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Is it time to kill off the apostrophe? I, for one, have always argued that we would be better off without that vexatious little punctuation mark, but it could be hard to engineer its demise.
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It is interesting the way we build up associations with words or phrases that give us a special right to them, often expressed as a claim to original coinage.
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A friend commented that our pollies are addicted to the phrase Let me be clear…. He feels that Shorten led the way but that the Liberals and the National Party politicians are now also working it to death.
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So many common expressions in everyday English spring from long-forgotten origins, often lending an almost surreal quality to our language.
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You would think that dictionary editors are not cut out to get honours from their country. They are not heroic enough, audacious enough, even just noticeable enough. But last Thursday I was presented with an AO at Government House.
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Did pudding go out of favour because it was yet another word for a penis (a meaning provided by Prof Google)? Was that how we arrived at spotted dick?
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It is not surprising really, given the subtleties of human communications, that we should have so many words and phrases with different connotations in the lexicon of verbal exchanges.
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I was not surprised, on a recent trip to Arnhem Land and Darwin, to find that there were plants that were – shock, horror! – not in the dictionary.
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It was with great delight that I noticed that one of my favourite newsletters, Placenames Australia, had lobbed into my mail.
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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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On Friday 13 July I attended a Colloquium held at the ANU in honour of Luise Hercus (nee Luise Schwarzschild), a linguist noted for her services to Aboriginal studies in both language and cult
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An eggcorn is an erroneous variant of a word, arrived at by altering one or more elements of the original word. Often the change is based on a folk etymology which means that the variant makes superficial sense to the speaker, whereas the original word was quite opaque.
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Les Murray is a great collector of words, be they from far away or from close to home.
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I read Tim Winton’s latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, twice. The first time to experience a wonderful novel. The second time to pull out the words that were new to me.
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Memories of childhood have a powerful effect on us. But there is one memory jogger that often takes us by surprise: some word we used that was special to our place, our community.
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The suggestion has been made that brumby comes from the Irish Gaelic bromach meaning ‘a young horse or colt’ with a plural form bromaigh pronounced ‘brummy’.
The interesting thing about brumby is that it does not show up until the 1870s.
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The origin of the word didjeridu has been argued as Aboriginal, Irish or English…
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The mystery of the origin of this household word.
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