Living language

JOHN HARMS: I am joined by Roly Sussex  and Sue Butler. Please welcome them. [applause] Today this term ‘living  language’ has kept coming up. I just wanted to ask Sue about her role with  words, because it’s been your life’s work, Sue. How did you get into it, and  what have you done?

SUSAN BUTLER: I got into  it by sheer accident. I was actually setting out to be a great Australian  composer but I ran out of money. I had previously done an arts degree in Latin  and Greek and a bit of linguistics, which equipped me to do absolutely nothing,  but I did get one of the few remaining jobs teaching Latin - and then came back  to do music. I did music for a year and a half until I ran out of money. I got  all sorts of jobs to remedy this: I worked in a chocolate factory but I had a  toothache; I worked in a belt factory but I couldn’t stand it; so I ended up  thinking, ‘I’m a good middle-class girl, I’ll get a nice middle-class job,’ and  the job happened to be research assistant on a dictionary for Australian  English.

JOHN HARMS: And that was Macquarie?

SUSAN BUTLER: That was Macquarie.

JOHN HARMS: And that was the first Macquarie.

SUSAN BUTLER: That was  the first Macquarie. That was about 1970. We  published the first edition in 1981.

JOHN HARMS: And whose idea was it, the  dictionary?

SUSAN BUTLER: It was an  idea that had a number of different beginnings. There had been this search for  a dictionary of Australian English among linguists. There were a group of  people - Professor Delbridge, Dr Ramson, John Bernard, David Blair - who formed  the initial editorial committee of the dictionary, but equally there was a  publisher who had searched for a dictionary on the back of a whole program of  educational publishing, literacy materials, teaching materials in the schools. A  number of teachers had thought, ‘It’s about time we stop teaching holly and  snow and whatever, and started teaching gum trees, kookaburras, kangaroos and  things.’ So they developed all this very Australian teaching material. Brian Clouston  was an educational publisher, and had one of these successful programs going and  he said what he wanted was a dictionary to go with it. Basically he wanted something  like the Concise Oxford but Australian. Well, his editor claims he actually  came up with the idea and was sent to talk to Professor Delbridge about doing  this. It was one of those ideas that had people in different parts of the country  all thinking about it, and they brought it together, amazingly.

JOHN HARMS: Was it thought of as risky  and ambitious or was it something that the publisher was confident would work?

SUSAN BUTLER: I think  Brian Clouston was confident because of the success of his reading programs, and  Australiana publishing had a big success then. However, he knew nothing about  dictionaries so he told Arthur Delbridge to have it done in two years and the two  years was extended to three. Then Brian fell out [with the company which owned  Jacaranda] and was eased out of the publishing company - so various things  happened.

JOHN  HARMS: It sounds like a novel.

SUSAN  BUTLER: We went into the university as a sort of sheltered workshop [otherwise  known as a research project] while we sorted out all of this. So a lot of  things happened. By the time we got to 1980, there was still a strong feeling of  national publishing and so on, but Oxford  was very strong. It is hard to think back to that time and remember that before  the Macquarie was published – because it now  seems so secure - it was a very risky undertaking indeed.

I  remember coming in and seeing Kevin Weldon, who was the publisher, slamming the  phone down, reaching for a glass of whiskey and saying, ‘This dictionary better  be as bloody good as you say it is or else I am absolutely done for.’ So it was  risky. And then suddenly it was there. We all held our breath and waited, and  the response was fantastic. It’s been great.

JOHN HARMS: And coincidentally Manning  Clark wrote the foreword.

SUSAN BUTLER: And Manning  Clark wrote the foreword. That was another nervous experience from my point of  view because here I am, a lonely little editor on this dictionary, and I can’t  even in a way explain what I am talking about because it is so hard to  visualise the dictionary before the event of its publication. But I tried to  explain and to ask Manning Clark, the great historian, to write the foreword to  it. Would he do it? We sat back and waited. And the answer came, yes, he would  do it. He did a very fine foreword for the first edition. [It helped that his  son, Axel Clark, worked on the first edition.]

JOHN HARMS: Roly, you’ve really got  language in the blood.

ROLY SUSSEX:  Yes, my father was a professor of French, my university degrees were in French  and Russian, and then I went to Prague  to do a PhD in 1968, which was a bad year. Eventually my Volkswagen and me and  a lot of books managed to get out. I worked in Germany as a translator in a  crystal factory for three months - so this is parallel to the belt factory. We  have something else in common.

SUSAN BUTLER: Oh, yes, so  you know what I mean.

ROLY SUSSEX: I  am also a failed muso [musician]. I was going to be a clarinetist until I  ruined an arm in school. I went to London  and did a PhD in Russian and linguistics so I have been a linguist every since.  I had the chair of Russian at the University   of Melbourne until 1989. I  was getting worried that Gorbachev was going to pull the whole thing down and  I’d be left with no job - head of gardening or something; I love gardening, but  no - and UQ [University of Queensland] said, ‘Would I like to come and talk to  them about a job in applied linguistics,’ and I have been there ever since.

My  involvement with English - and unlike Susan and Bruce, I am not a lexicographer  but I am certainly a lexicologist, a word freak - began really with the ABC  [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. They rang up about 14 years ago and  said, ‘People are griping about the standard of public English. Would you like  to come and do a program?’ So I went down to the local ABC and the phone lit up  like a Christmas tree - and we’ve been going ever since.

Every  week I do three language talkback programs, one with Queensland,  one with South Australia  and one with the [Northern] Territory. I was on Radio National last week with  Richard Aedy. I write a column for the Courier-Mail every Saturday on language.  And we have an email list called Lang Talk which runs behind all these, with  about 80 people worldwide who are interested in language in Australia. If anyone is interested,  get hold of me after, and I will scribe you all digitally.

I  am busy doing a dictionary at the moment of diminutives, things like ‘wino’, ‘derro’,  ‘Huey’ and ‘Hawkie’  and so on about with which we shall talk anon. So I have become enormously  interested in Australian English, and proud of it, and love sloshing around in  this great big soup that we are experiencing at the moment.

JOHN HARMS: One of the things that has  emerged today is the idea that language has life, that there is some resistance  to change but some acceptance of change. Your theme is that a living language  is a changing language. It has to change to live.

ROLY SUSSEX: Not  only but also I think at the moment Australian English is distinguished by the  fact that we’ve got multiple parallel streams of the language. There are not  only different sorts of Australian English, but we are surrounded by various  sorts of British English - watch The Bill tonight, and you will see it - Canadian, New Zealand, South African. Any  South Africans here? We can do South African. Good. I won’t insult you further.

As  a result, instead of having a single model, as you have say in Russian or  French, where the academy says ‘This is the language, this is our monument and  you will worship at it and woe be to you if you actually destroy it or sully  it,’ in Australian English we are busy trying to find out where we are and  where we are going. In France  after all, if a journalist uses an Anglo word where there is a Gaelic word,  they will be taken to court and fined.

JOHN HARMS: Really?

ROLY SUSSEX: Yes,  really, and it has happened. Think of that in Australia. We are the ultimate  eclectics, if you like, but also the inheritors of an incredibly rich  tradition. David said this morning that, as soon as English becomes an  international language, it’s dead. It seems to be live and kicking actually, but  one of the things that Susan and I want to talk about is why it is kicking so  well.

JOHN HARMS: Well, let’s take that up.

SUSAN BUTLER: We have  picked up on the theme of change - this is something that I encounter in my  working life all the time. I also encounter the people who love it and the  people who resist it. It seems to me that in all aspects of life we have this  kind of balance between conservatives and optimists. The optimists greet the  words that we put up on the website each year with cries of delight and say,  ‘Oh isn’t that lovely’, ‘that one’s good fun’ and ‘I hadn’t heard of that but I  can find a use for that somewhere,’ and the pessimists say, ‘What are you doing  introducing all this ruination into the language,’ and so on. So somewhere  between the two we carry on doing this sort of thing.

So  along with change we want to now introduce the notion of standards as they  relate to change, and standards working with change, sometimes bumpily and  sometimes quite well. We’re going to start with change in the pronunciation  patterns in Australian English; we’re picking up in a way on what Bruce said  about dealing with pronunciation on one side and lexicon on the other. So Roly  will deal with pronunciation – over to you.

ROLY SUSSEX: One  of the odd things about English is that the written language or the written  standards, if you like, are much more standard across different jurisdictions. You  might find if you pick up a newspaper that you’re not sure whether it was  written in Delhi, in Wellington, in Tokyo or wherever, with the exception of  spelling and a few odd lexical uses; whereas the spoken language, as we all  know, is enormously varied and in many cases unstable.

The  standards of the Australian accent - Bruce talked about this earlier - were  starting to emerge roundabout 1830. Although we don’t have clear phonetic  evidence until a bit later, it is obvious that we were distinct. Unfortunately  we don’t have the New    Zealand data that Bruce was talking about,  but we can work out things from early recordings about what Australian English  sounded like.

I’ve  been listening to some early Melbourne Cups and the VFL Grand Final, and the  standards of Australian spoken English in some ways have not changed as much as  you might expect. What has happened, I think, is that an interesting thing,  noticed by [AG] Mitchell and [A] Delbridge in their book on Australian  pronunciation [The Pronunciation of  English in Australia], has shifted. In 1970 their book said that there were  basically three sorts: it was educated, about the top 11 per cent, ‘top’ in  terms of social prestige and education; there was a big group called ‘general  Australians’ in the middle, about 56 per cent; and then ‘broad Australian’. That  was possibly prompted a great deal by the experience of the soldiers in the  trenches in First World War.

Then  there was ethnic English in Australia,  and that covers a huge range of different accents, not only Aboriginal English  but also Greek English - do you remember Con the Fruiterer? ‘Bootiful’ and  again in different levels and flavours. What appears to have happened out of  the last few years is that we’re converging towards the middle. There are fewer  speakers at the educated top end - in other words, fewer like Mr [Alexander] Downer  - but there are somewhat fewer also at the socially lower end [imitates accent].  That sort of thing is now less prevalent than it was, and we seem to be now  congealing in the middle towards a more standard accent, if you like.

On  the other hand, there are many important instabilities, part of which has to do  with our exposure to American English. I’ve got some lovely examples which I  want to discuss with you, in particular in relation to stress. Word stress has  been a problem in Australia  for years: do you say ‘pittosporum’  or ‘pittosporum’ [pronounces  differently], the gardeners among you; do you say ‘clematis’ or ‘clematis’? You  hear both. But recently I picked up ‘vaccination’  rather than ‘vaccination’, on the  radio yesterday ‘paraplegic’ rather  than ‘paraplegic’ and even Don  Watson this morning said ‘sixteen’  rather than ‘sixteen’. These things  we don’t really pay much attention to and, until you become sensitised, you may  not be aware of it. I hope today that what I will do is to make you excessively  sensitive, and you’ll provide me with thousands of examples.

What  seems to be happening is that first of all stress seems to be moving towards  the front of words, which actually happened before in middle English by the way;  second, there a few words where the stress is moving away from the first syllable;  and, third, there are some examples where this is actually having an effect on  the pronunciation of vowels. So let’s have a look at those: the first syllable  in proper names. When I was a kid it was ‘Fiji’ and ‘Mindanao,’ now  by default it is ‘Fiji’ and ‘Mindanao’ - first syllable – and ‘Afghanistan’ rather than ‘Afghanistan’, ‘Pakistan’ rather than ‘Pakistan.’  If you think a little bit, you realise that we’ve actually have had a stress  shift of quite substantial proportions.

In  Melbourne, poor  old things - I can say that because I come from there - they don’t know whether  it’s ‘Toorak’ or ‘Toorak’, ‘Fitzroy’ or ‘Fitzroy’. In  Brisbane there’s a place called ‘Mount Gravatt’;  visitors from down the south - the Mexicans so called, and they still number me  among those although we’ve been there since 1989 - ask ‘What’s the way to Mount Gravatt,’ and the locals go ‘Ha, Ha,  I know you come from Victoria.’ [laughter]

This  is interesting because we are moving the stress to the first syllable not just  where we’re imitating the Americans who do have the tendency in that direction  but also in places where the Americans don’t. Australians will tend to say ‘Illinois,’ whereas the Americans, who  know perfectly well that it was first written that way by French speakers, will  say ‘Illinois.’ OK?

Now  even more so probably with compound Latin-derived words with a prefix: ‘translation’? No, ‘translation’. There are in fact thousands of those around in the  vocabulary. Also, the move to the first syllable in phrases. When I was younger  the place where the American President lived was the ‘White House’. Now, quite clearly it follows  the American ‘White House’, where  you treat adjective plus noun as a phrase and put the stress on the first  element.

I  heard yesterday on the radio ‘garlic  bread’ not ‘garlic bread’ - that was My Kitchen Rules and they ought to  know. Someone said that [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn’s novel was not ‘Cancer Ward’ but ‘Cancer Ward’. Twenty years ago I think that sort of stress would have  been regarded as emphatic; nowadays, it is increasingly standard.

The  move of the stress or rather problems with stress are also found in French-derived  words like ‘ballet’ and ‘ballet.’ Probably the most interesting  one in Australia  is ‘perfume’ and ‘perfume’. I actually went to Myer one day  approaching Christmas and said ‘what was the difference,’ and they said, ‘Perfume is over $400 and perfume is under’, [laughter] which  tells you that the French-derived one, which is also the American one by the  way, has more prestige and therefore more dollars.

There’s  a whole stack of these. They’re typically American; they’re all from French;  and they all move the stress onto the last syllable. So ‘ballet,’ ‘baton,’ ‘beret,’ ‘bourgeois’, ‘cafe’ - that could be Italian I suppose -‘debris’ rather than ‘debris’,  ‘debut’ - by the way, that is the  most awful word. What happens if you make it into a verb and do a past tense?  ‘Yesterday he debuted?’ No one quite  knows. ‘Frontier’, and for that  matter ‘premiere,’ ‘garage’ - this one is funny. It goes all  over the place. These ones, I think you’ll agree, are among the pronunciations  that we do hear some of in Australia.  I’ve heard someone say both ‘research’  and ‘research’ in the same sentence.  So we are truly unstable and unsure where they’re going.

Americans  will tend to say ‘Renaissance’  rather than ‘Renaissance’, and I  think with a few exceptions they are a rather interesting group of words  because they’re a pattern where the stress is moving away from the first  syllable for a very specific reason; and that is, we appear to be imitating the  Americans. Apart from that, American also is ‘St Augustine’  rather than ‘Augustine.’ I’ve heard  that from native Australian speakers. If you have a dog it’s a ‘St Bernard’ rather than a ‘St Bernard’, not to mention the  philosopher ‘Nietzsche’ rather than  ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘Van Gogh,’ rather than ‘Van Gogh.’ So stress is actually having  quite an interesting, unstable effect on our vocabulary.

I’ve  got a few other examples like ‘regulatory’,  ‘ceremony’, ‘laboratory’ and ‘mandatory’, and so on. This is a slightly different phenomenon. In  American English there is a smaller difference between stressed and unstressed  syllables in terms of pitch, volume and length than there is in particularly  Australian and most particularly upper-class British English. You can imagine –  and I’m overdoing it right now - ‘secretry’, barely two syllables – whereas ‘secretary’  in American is four. What happens in American English is that unstressed  syllables have more prominence, and therefore the vowel is more fully realised.  Over time this can even attract the stress, which is why in 2000 at the  Olympics there was a mandate out that Australian broadcasters would kindly say  ‘ceremony,’ and NBC in the next  booth was saying ‘ceremony.’ I’m afraid  at the last Olympics we’ve had a great vacillation - the Winter Olympics  included - between ‘ceremony’ and  ceremony’, and among younger people  ‘ceremony’ is on the up.

SUSAN BUTLER: Where does  ‘carstle’ and ‘castle’ fit in?

ROLY SUSSEX: Different.  The ah/a thing is educated British and South    Australia versus the rest. If you come from South Australia, you  probably say ‘dahnce’ and Alexahnder’; if you come from elsewhere you probably  say ‘dance’ and ‘Alexander’. Newcastle is ‘Newcahstle’  in New South Wales and South   Australia but is ‘Newcastle’  everywhere else. The ‘a’ pronunciation is typical of British outside of the  south-eastern counties.

More examples: ‘Ordinarily’.  This is interesting because if you get something which has a simpler other form,  that stress will tend to dominate. ‘Console’  gives you ‘inconsolable’ rather than  ‘inconsolable’; ‘demonstrably’ gives you ‘demonstrably’, and ‘comparably’ rather than ‘comparably’. Some of you are looking  really ill. [laughter] I’m sorry. ‘Irrevocably’  rather than ‘irrevocably’ - you can  see what’s happening that we are in fact getting away from patterns where there  was a difference of stress between the verb and the derived word and they’re  tending to normalise into just one pattern.

A  few others while I’m on the subject of pronunciation, the ‘yu’ sound is in  trouble - ‘acupuncture’ or ‘acapuncture’. You will probably hear ‘acapuncture’ more than the other one. ‘Revolution’ or ‘revolution’, ‘resolution’ or ‘resolution’.  After all, ‘suit’ has long become ‘soot’  - that’s OK, that’s gone. But I actually heard David Malouf this morning say ‘nuance’, the American way. How many of  you are ‘noode’ people as opposed to ‘nude’ people? I’m sorry, I won’t ask  that; it’s too embarrassing. [laughter]

What  about ‘revolution’ and ‘revolution’? The ‘yu’ sound is weird. I hear  quite often ‘foliage,’ rather than  ‘foliage’ in the gardening programs;  ‘palliative’ becomes ‘pallative’; ‘value’ becomes ‘value’; ‘Australia’ is  ‘Australya’ in the speech of Pauline Hanson who has recently left these shores;  ‘million’ becomes ‘million.’ What’s happening here is that  you’ve got two consonants; the second one wins. So that in ‘million’, ‘l’ is  the end of one syllable, ‘yu’ is the start of the next one, the second one  wins, so ‘million’ becomes ‘million.’ It’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s  moderately systematic, and I think it’s getting further.

‘Yu’  plus a dental like ‘su’ - ‘tisyu’ is already British and rather affected in Australia.  Everyone says ‘tishue’ except for very careful speakers. What about ‘nuclear fission’? That’s a hyper-correction. I  once heard Mr Peacock say that; I’m not quite sure if he was having a bad day  or not. What about ‘asume’? Mostly  that’s ‘ashume’; and ‘consumers’; whereas careful speakers and  the more British ones ‘asume.’ I’ve  even heard ‘assoome’ recently, and  that of course is doing the American thing of getting rid of the ‘yu’.

JOHN HARMS: Roly, if you want to hear  pronunciation butchered you need to listen to a few horse races.

ROLY SUSSEX: Oh  yes.

JOHN HARMS: Because recently I heard a  race caller talk of a horse called Sword of Damocles [laughter] and Anti-podean  [laughter] - I kid you not, sorry.

ROLY SUSSEX: He’s  got the good lines, hasn’t he? Just a couple more which actually don’t have to  do with Americanisms. You’ll hear quite often ‘terr-rism’ rather than ‘terrorism’, ‘libry’ rather than ‘library’,  ‘deter’rate’ rather than ‘deteriorate,’  and ‘regu’ly’ and ‘itine’ry.’ What’s happening here, particularly with R, is  that the English ‘r’ is a retro-flex, which means it’s made with the tongue up  and back. That is actually a most unusual position for ‘r’ in the languages of  the world. Usually it’s ‘rrr’ like Italian, which is dead easy,’ or it’s ‘rru’ as  in French which is no problem at all, as long as you’re French. But if you’re  going to get your tongue into the retro-flex position in adjacent syllables,  then you have to work quite hard, and the tendency at speed is to leave one  syllable out. So ‘terrorism’ becomes ‘terr’rism’. Once again, it shows you how,  in even not uncareful speech, differences and parallel standards are starting  to emerge around us.

We  haven’t yet got to ‘nucular,’ that is an Americanism, thanks be to George W  [Bush] but actually he is not the first American President to do that. Eisenhower  said it at least once, so did Clinton.  By the way, there are two words that go ‘cular,’ the other one is ‘cochlear.’  All the other ones go ‘clear’ like ‘nuclear’ and so on, and therefore,  ‘nucular’ is following a pattern.

The  sounds of Australian English are in some kind of ferment. Some people say we’re  becoming more like the New Zealanders - no. Felicity Cox at Macquarie  has good data to say that we are not. We do not have ‘fush and chups’. Are  there any Kiwis here by the way? [laughter] May I?

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: You can.

ROLY SUSSEX: A  Kiwi got up on Auckland Harbour Bridge  with a huge paint-brush and wrote ‘Australia  sucks’ and someone from Australia  got up the next day and wrote ‘New    Zealand nil.’ [laughter] Counter to the view  that the Englishes of the world are converging, New Zealand is going off on its  own. Not only that, when you are sleeping you go to ‘bed’ rather than to ‘bed,’  which does not mean you’re going to the TAB. ‘Alexander’ becomes ‘Alexender’,  which is found in Australia  as well. If you ask for someone’s ‘selery’, you’re not sure if you’re  vegetables or money. Think about it, you’ll hear more than you think. On the  other hand, in New Zealand ‘clean air’ is what have after a bath or what you  breathe, and in fact ‘ear’ and ‘air’ are falling together. That means that some  Englishes are maintaining their distinction, and for my money Australian  English is doing at least as well by sounding distinctively ‘Ostrylian’. [laughter  and applause]

SUSAN BUTLER: Well having  confronted what is happening to Australian English pronunciation, I’m now going  to talk about what has happened to the words of Australian English, the things  that are put in the ‘diction’ry’ or  the ‘dictionary.’ The Europeans who  arrived had in front of them a whole new terrain, a whole new landscape. They  had to find new words to deal with this, so they did it in the accepted ways in  which English expands and copes with these situations. So they borrowed from  the local languages, for example, ‘kangaroo.’ In Captain Cook’s journal, ‘one  of the men saw an animal something less than a greyhound, it was of a mouse  colour, very slender made and swift of foot called by the natives ‘kangaroo’. So  we acquired a certain number of words from Aboriginal languages in that way.

The  other way of coping with the situation was to take words that were part of your  common store and apply them, adapt them to deal with the new situation. So  something like a ‘paddock’, which in British English was a small field or  enclosure, becomes the Australian paddock which can be as large as a small  country.

We  also borrowed from American English ‘bushranger’, which we think of as being  entirely our own thing, I think, but it started out in American English and  meant there what we think of a bushman. It was a frontiersman, someone who  travelled through the bush, lived in the bush. We did a hell of a lot more with  bushranger than the Americans did. They kind of dropped it, so I think we can  claim it now as being definitely Australian English.

A  creek in British English was a little inlet or arm of the sea; whereas in  Australian English it becomes part of that hierarchy of waterways. A creek,  whether it has water in it or not, whether it is small or big or twice the size  of your nearby river, is a creek because it flows into a river and the river  flows into the larger water.

So  we took these terms from other Englishes and adapted them. Then we formed new  compounds by taking words, usually one word which was significant like bush and  attaching it to other words to create a compound that was something more,  something different than just the sum of its parts. So you get the bush ballad,  the bush biscuit, the bush blanket, the bush carpenter, the bush cook, bush  costume/dress, bush duty, bush experience - and on and on it goes. Different  Englishes do this sort of thing. In Singaporean Malaysian English, it is a word  like ‘temple’ or ‘dragon’ that becomes that significant word and attaches a  whole lot of words to it that become compounds with their own specific meaning.  So that is the basic procedure for expanding the vocabulary to cope with the  situation.

What  I thought I would do is to take you on a little gallop through the lexicon of  Australian English, what we might think of as the traditional lexicon of  Australian English, and then fetch up with where we are at the moment. We start  with convict terms. You have the traps for the police; a plant for a cache of  stores, something that you put somewhere for later; new chums and old chums are  convict terms from the hulks which come out of the colony and become terms of  the new people who have been in there for a while or people who have just come off  of the boat. I do not know that we talk about old chums so much but we  certainly talk about new chums - the office new chum has got to be shown  around.

ROLY SUSSEX: Sue,  just on that for later, didn’t you mean to say ‘for Ron’? You always have ‘for  Ron’ for later on?

SUSAN BUTLER: Thank you,  yes, of course I did.

We  acquired pastoral terms like bush, scrub, creek, paddocks, squatters, rosellas,  cocky farmers, mates and so on. ‘Rosella’ is one of those words that you might  think of as being an Aboriginal borrowing but it is not. It comes from ‘Rose Hill.’  It is the bird they saw at Rose Hill and it became a rosella. Bit of a trap.

WOMAN  IN AUDIENCE: You get rosellas as plants?

SUSAN BUTLER: Bruce, the  rosella as a plant? That is a word transferred from British English, there you  go.

Aboriginal  borrowings like billabong, brolga, jarrah, kangaroo, mallie, kookaburra, wombat  and budgerigar. And once budgerigar gets shortened to budgie, everyone forgets  that it is actually from something that sounds like an Aboriginal borrowing.  From the goldfields we had fossick - I love that word ‘fossick’ – diggers,  billies and hatters (eccentric miners and bushmen they were), and shepherding,  shepherding a mining claim which is nice because it transfers to football where  you shepherd the person who holds the ball.

Moving  on to about 1890s and early 1900s, you get the interest in the bush among the  people living in the cities, romantic notions of the bush captured in the bush  ballad, and  a certain number of city words  as well: bludgers, wowsers and a lurk.

During  World War One we get diggers, bonza, cobber, furphy for that story you don’t  entirely believe – furphy is another one I really like, and it seems to be  surviving - and the brass razoo.

Then  the Depression: the bottler, the sleep-out, the susso.

World  War II: emu parade, giggle suit, fatigue suit, milk run, troppo for going  slightly crazy, galah for a fool and spine bashing. I do wish we could keep  spine bashing; it’s a lovely word but it doesn’t seem to be hanging around much  longer. Spine bashing means having a rest, lying down, sleeping. So that takes  us up to the Second World War, and then things started to be very different  indeed.

We  had this influx of American English, we had the pace of life changing with a  whole lot of technology. I remember the 1980s where, for the first time, we had  the PC on our  desks, and we learnt about things being user-friendly - everyone thought that  was great fun so I had citations for a fridge being described as user-friendly  and then a car door being described as user-vicious. [laughter] This is nice;  we played around with that sort of stuff.

That  kind of progress produced by  the mix of  IT, slang, fashion, American English, and so on results in the new words in the  fifth edition, where you have new sports - we seem to be inventing new sports  so fast these days. We have adventure running, and you have an adventure race;  an attack ad; baby daddy; your besties, your best friends; boyzilian wax; car  crash TV; clothing swap party; connoisseur tourism (there’s been a whole spate of  different tourisms); cowboy boots for fashion; crunk cup; deceptive marketing;  divorce genes; ear gauging; ebook readers; iconocrats; electronic whiteboards,  ethical shopping, film tourism, folksonomy, forfeiting, freakonomics, future-proofing  things, and so on. Those words seem incredibly different from the sorts of  words that we regard as being traditional Australian English. That’s the kind  of influx of new words that we’re dealing with.

If  I do a similar quick gallop through slang in Australian English, you get  convict slang such as  a lark; being  queer for being unwell; shaking someone down; doing something on the sly;  snitching on someone; snoozing for sleeping; a stake for booty; a swag; a swell;  a toddler; turning up trumps; spinning a yarn; and your whack for your share. And  also kid for a young thief, which I’m sure is where we got that message that  was sent to us by all our teachers and parents that you mustn’t talk about kids  - kids are young goats. You’re not going down to the street to play with the  other kids, they’re the other children, not the young goats. And I’m sure it  was because kid had this unfortunate connotation, and people didn’t want to be  implying that the neighbour’s children were in some way involved with thieving  activity. Anyway, for better or worse, these words that came in with convict  jargon are still really colloquialisms in Australian English. Even though we’ve  forgotten completely where they came from, there is this sense that they are  never to be granted complete respectability. They’ll always be in a fringe area  of Australian English.

After  that, we had the British hand-me-downs from the language of London. Throughout the late 1800s London was the centre of the universe, as America  probably is now. So we followed all those fashions in London and picked up as soon as we could on what  was the latest thing to say. We brought with us a certain amount of dialect  that became slang in Australian English. So we have: flummoxing to astonish  people; a fluke; have a geek at something; give someone gyp; joshing someone; a  mollydooker for a lefthander and a mullygrubber for the low ball in cricket;  Rafferty’s rules; taking a punt, the rozzers, shivoo, skerrick, slummucky,  smidgen, smoodging, little tackers and so on.

I  am going to leap from there to post Second World War and what we are dealing  with now. As I said, now we are dealing with being besties with someone, about  someone being ‘the man’, about saying ‘duh’ when you wish to be insulting to  someone, about saying ‘your mum’ when you wish to be insulting to someone. You  know that one? It’s a sort of shortened version of ‘your mum’s a’ something or  other. So you don’t bother to expand it all, you just say ‘your mum’ and this  implies complete derision of what was said before.

So  you can see the progression in lexicon and how life has changed in Australian  English. If you are a language optimist you say, ‘Yes, well, this is what it is  all about and this is us moving on.’ If you are a language pessimist, you are a  bit scared. It’s one of the funny things about change. We view it in different  ways, depending on how distant, how removed we are from the change.

At  this point, I’d like to invite Bruce to give us the first lines of The Canterbury Tales, being our mediaeval  expert in our midst. I sprung this on him.

BRUCE  MOORE: If you remember the first lines of ‘The  Canterbury  Tales it is about the coming of spring and Chaucer saying: well, when  spring comes, of course we all go on pilgrimages or pilgrim-ah-ges. It goes: