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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Can we credit an Irish policeman with this word?
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I will happily accept Irish origins for Australianisms but there needs to be some evidence.
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When an Aussie shouts you a beer, he never raises his voice.
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We seem to have taken on the idea that our speech is slovenly and will go out of way to prove it.
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‘I want to express my gratefulness’ she said, and then paused. ‘Is that a real word?
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The Macquarie Dictionary has struggled with relationships over the years. Who would have thought the definition of family could be so complicated!
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Combining work and play means going to the Royal Easter Show and feeling virtuous about working at the same time.
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Another example of etymology folklore. I listened to someone explaining that they loved the word grouse meaning ‘excellent’ which was interesting because I thought it might have been on the way out.
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Recently I visited an exhibition on the Gadigal people. I read from the curator’s text that gadi was the name of the grass tree, an important totem for the people who lived near Sydney Harbour.
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