Dinkum Dictionary
Australians have a way of saying things that can confound other English speakers. The Dinkum Dictionary tells the stories behind the origins of a rich mix of distinctly Australian words and phrases.
In following the origins of these words we can see the pathways to the present. We can see, in the words that we have taken to be our own, where we have borrowed, where we have been inventive, and where we have adapted words to our own use. This is what makes Australian English different and special -- the fact that we have taken English and shaped it to fit our unique experience of the world.
'How many of us realise we are using Australian English when we call an argument a "blue", when we dismiss a tall story as a "furphy", or when we affectionately call a friend a "boofhead"? These kinds of discoveries are part of the pleasure of this dictionary.' The Age.
Publisher: The Text Publishing
The Aitch Factor
For thirty years, as Editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, Susan Butler has been in the front row watching Australians defend, reject, embrace and argue heatedly about every aspect of language usage. She has witnessed crusades against 'youse', ducked the missiles over the phrase 'man boobs', pondered the changing pronunciation of 'Beijing', recorded -- controversially -- the evolving meaning of 'misogyny' and wondered why on earth we still cling to the grammarian's flourish known as the apostrophe.
Drawing on her own depth of experience, community consultation and the odd letter of outrage, Butler chronicles er unique adventures with the wonderfully malleable but strangely resilient beast known as the English language, and pays particular attention to the way Australians have trained it to fit their circumstances.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
New Words 2018
Changes in Australian English
New Words 2018 Changes in Australian English is a record of the words which have gained currency in this variety of English in this year.
Words in 2018 ranged from politics to science and technology to colloquialisms. Politics was coloured by the anxiety about the truthiness or the fakeness of what was being said, so words like fauxpology and deep fake were high in currency, the latter being my word of the year.
The continuing concern with the drought meant that we acquired words like droughtlot and confinement paddock,while on the other hand the occasional flooding rain gave us the concept of the sponge city.
The new words in this collection will allow a retrospective visit to these years through the prism of the terms that we felt that we needed to have.
Rebel Without a Clause
Losing the Linguistic Plot…
Sue Butler
Many of us yearn for someone to tell us the rights and wrongs of language usage. As Sue Butler brooded over this problem she realised that only God could lay down the law successfully. God’s Grammar would be recorded on tablets of stone, naturally.
The first ‘Thou Shalt Not’ would be:
Thou shalt not indulge in stream-of-consciousness writing, untroubled by punctuation that might have assisted the reader, although littered with exclamation marks and unnecessary capitalisation to indicate emotional force.
This would be regarded as a mortal sin and offenders would be forever tormented in the punctuation chamber of Hell, seared by full stops and flayed by commas, with colons and semicolons crashing down like thunderbolts, and the voice of God booming, ‘New paragraph!’
This book covers many of the contemporary issues of writing in the English language, with excursions into history, style and word play. All with a light touch.
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia
New Words 2020
Changes in Australian English
This is a record of the words which have gained currency in this variety of English in the year 2020.
New words in 2020 ranged from politics to science and technology to colloquialisms. Politics was coloured by the need to deal with COVID-19, with words like economic hibernation, snapback, mask diplomacy and sovcit. The medical world gave us community transmission, cough cloud, super spreader and virtual hospital. Colloquialisms included the Rona (coronavirus), quazza (quarantine), iso (isolation) and hanny san (hand sanitizer).
It was probably a year we would all like to forget, but here is a record of the many ways our lives and language changed.
New Words 2021
Changes in Australian English
The bulk of the new words this year were to do with COVID-19. Some were medical words like breakthrough infection and COVID pill and dexamethasone. The Greek alphabet was used as the basis for naming all the variants of COVID-19, although the notable ones were the Delta variant and the Omicron variant.
Some were jokey words related to our reactions to COVID. It would seem that lawn porn remained an obsession and that we consumed a lot of locktails. Porch pirates could be regarded as a COVID-related phenomenon in that the pandemic generally and lockdown in particular meant that we had a lot more parcels delivered to our homes. There were some out-and-out colloquialisms like locky d for lockdown and put on the hard pants meaning ‘to knuckle down to doing something not to our liking’, like dressing up in uncomfortable clothes as we returned to the office.
Politics played its part in the transition from COVID zero to living with COVID. The switch from the rollout of the vaccines to the strollout was particularly Australian.
But other things have happened. We still occasionally think about our concerns about the environment so we have considered blue carbon and the cool roof and the wearing of trashion. Australia, to our shame, has been labelled a climate laggard.
Our preoccupation with health and beauty has not waned either so the possibility of fat freezing to avoid the more invasive liposuction was a pleasing development. Pity it is such a gamble! We took up cow hugging to lower our stress levels and achieve a bovine heart rate. The most interesting trend was towards being sober curious, that is, finding out what life is like when you don’t drink alcohol.
While strollout and porch pirate have garnered support, and deservedly so, I am going to give Word of the Year to the yarning circle. I think this is an interesting example of crossover from Indigenous to white culture with beneficial effect. There should be more of it.
Sue Butler
December 2021
The Dictionary and Mim
These four stories are designed for children who are using dictionaries and who enjoy word play. They cover some basic concepts that young readers need to grasp when they are using the dictionary but in a way that will amuse and entertain them. They can be used as a teaching resource for lessons on the dictionary.
The stories are:
The Dictionary and the big long words
The Dictionary gets out on the wrong side of the bed
The Dictionary and the letter q
The Dictionary and the Sportsletter of the Year
There is a set of definitions for the big long words in the first story.
This book is for all those children who have discovered a love of language and word play — and dictionaries!
Published by KDP January 2023
Available on Amazon
New Words 2019
Changes in Australian English
The politics of the year provided some new Australian coinages such as the quiet Australians and the Voice to Parliament. Politicians borrowed and adapted a couple of items from American English such as wedgislation and bothsidesism.
The picture of how our society is shaping up is painted by such terms as silver tsunami, the death clean and the death café. Suddenly the concerns of old age loom large. The younger generation views all this patronisingly, dismissing the laments of their elders with OK boomer!
The Me-Too crisis produced the consent guardian. The general sense of depression forced such deliberately upbeat creations as up lit and hopepunk. On the internet there were those who decided that others had done something beyond the pale and therefore invoked cancel culture, while others engaged in meme warfare to win and argument. The first generation to grow up posting online is now seeking the right to be forgotten.
This was also the year where the threenager was identified as an age category of small children, and the bin cocky became the topic of research because of its ability to open garbage bins.
But it was the environment that was first and foremost in our minds this year with climate emergency, climate crisis, climate strike, climate exodus and climate fires leading to eco-anxiety and climate grief. The megafire became a reality for us. We struggled to do something positive for the environment by measuring our plastic footprint, building passive houses, adopting pumped hydro, and, in some few instances, taking up seasteading.
New Words 2022
Changes in Australian English
Every year the dictionaries announce their chosen Word of the Year. The OED ran with goblin mode, voted in by its subscribers. Merriam-Webster checked the word which has been most frequently looked up on its website. In 2022 it was gaslighting as the spotlight was thrown on the way in which women are manipulated in abusive relationships. Collins had a good list if you are looking for a set of words that reflect how life was in Britain: Partygate (Boris and friends), Carolean (the adjective from Charles), warm bank (a place to go to get warm when your own house is freezing), and quiet quitting (resolving to work official hours and not give over your whole life to your work). They went for words which had significance as much as for out-and-out new words. Ultimately Collins chose permacrisis (a state of permanent world-wide instability and upheaval). Macquarie Dictionary and the Australian National Dictionary both went for teal (basically Liberal but with environmental concerns).
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. In the previous two years there was a rush of COVID words and COVID jokes that provided easy pickings but this year there were only a few new variants to name along with a few new discoveries about life with COVID such as flurona, Covid rebound and hybrid immunity.
Politics provided the greatest interest — it was an election year — with terms like hinge point, grey corruption, singing Kumbaya, and teal candidate. There were a few colloquialisms like bougie (excellent), bachelor’s handbag (takeaway roast chook in a plastic bag), a nimrod (an idiot), and a cooker (right-wing extremist with anti-vax and government conspiracy ideas).
In terms of things that had more general interest, there was e-change, goblin mode, sober coach, heteropessimism, soft life, technology abuse, and situationship.