The publication of this number of Ozwords coincides with the publication of the second edition of the Australian Oxford Dictionary, which first appeared in 1999. This provides me with an opportunity to address an issue that is often raised by users of dictionaries: how do words get into dictionaries? One thing is certain. They do not come from people who write to us hopefully, saying: 'I have invented this word. It fulfils a purpose. I invented it on 22 September 2004. Please put it in your dictionary.' No joke. We get quite a few of these letters each year.
But words sometimes do get into dictionaries in mysterious ways. The most notorious example of this is the word dord, which appeared in the 1934 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. The entry read: 'dord (dôrd) n. Physics & Chem. Density.' The sequence of events seems to have been as follows: 1. A decision was made that the abbreviations for this edition would be in a separate section at the back of the dictionary. 2. An expert in chemistry submitted a card for the abbreviation section with the notation: 'D or d cont/density', by which he meant that at the abbreviation D the present entries would need to be 'cont(inued)' with an entry for 'density'. 3. This card became mixed up with the cards for 'new entries'. 4. An editor ignored the 'cont/', misread the spaces on either side of the word 'or', and made a new headword dord. Pronunciation, part of speech, and subject label were added without any research. 5. Some years later another editor noticed the curious absence of an etymology, and unravelled the mess. 7. The word was removed from the dictionary in 1940.
There is a very important dictionary-making lesson here. You should not put words in dictionaries unless you have collected the evidence for their existence, and can make this evidence available to public scrutiny. This is the fundamental principle on which the Oxford English Dictionary operates, and it is the fundamental principle on which the Australian National Dictionary Centre operates. It is a sad fact of publishing that some dictionaries simply feed off other dictionaries, and this is no doubt the origin of the myth that lexicographers put some invented entries in their dictionaries in order to catch out the plagiarists. The early slang dictionaries were often of this kind. In the June 2000 number of Ozwords Judith Robertson demonstrated how a number of words in Cornelius Crowe's Australian Slang Dictionary (1895) have been taken up by other slang dictionaries when there is no independent evidence of the words' existence.
Robertson has similarly demonstrated how the manuscript of Material for a Dictionary of Australian Slang, compiled by A.G. Stephens and S.E. O'Brienbetween 1900 and 1910 has similarly been uncritically plundered. At joey Stephens and O'Brien add a 'new' meaning: 'an hermaphrodite or sodomite: applied generally to any foppish or effeminate young man'. There is no suggestion that Stephens and O'Brien made this up--one of them must have heard the word being used this way, or perhaps misunderstood it for another word. But there is absolutely no other evidence for this sense of joey. Sidney Baker had access to the manuscript, and he added this sense in the 1941 edition of his Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang: 'JOEY: a baby kangaroo. (2) a young child. (3) An hermaphrodite. (4) A sodomite. (5) Applied generally to a foppish or effeminate young man.' The British lexicographer Eric Partridge got hold of Baker's book and added the entry to his large and influential Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, giving this Australian sense at his joey entry: 'A hermaphrodite: a sodomite; an effeminate or foppish young man neither hermaphrodite nor sodomite.' And so from dictionary to dictionary this piece of nonsense has acquired a life of its own.
These examples demonstrate the need not merely for care, but also for evidence in the compiling of dictionaries. But what is 'evidence'? As a general rule of thumb we would expect a word to be around for about five years, and to be used in at least five texts of different kinds. But there will obviously be exceptions to this rule of thumb. When SARS appeared in 2003 the use of the term was immediately widespread, and there was no chance that it would prove to be ephemeral. We, along with other lexicographers, added it to our dictionaries. The terms SMS and text message were suddenly so ubiquitous that it would have been folly to insist on the five-year rule.
You will recall that in the build-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Kevan Gosper became a figure of controversy. In the Sunday Telegraph (May 2000) we find: ' "He's done a Gosper (made a blue)" is already a folkism. The phrase made several appearances during the AFL football broadcasts this past week.' The Canberra Times (May 2000) was so sure that this was a stayer that it set out information for future lexicographers: 'Etymologists please note, when the PM displaced the Queen from the front of the queue to open the Games, he was "doing a Gosper".' The Australian (May 2000) explained the term: 'Being "gospered" is the classic example of how those who aspire to prominent positions in the public trust can destroy a reputation carefully built up over years by one foolish mistake. The court of public opinion passes a very harsh judgment.' These terms to do a gosper and to be gospered seemed to be real goers. By the end of 2000, however, they were dead. Much the same happened with to do a Bradbury in 2002.
A similar problem was raised by the term dewogging, which made its appearance during the 1996 federal election campaign:
1996 Federal Queensland National Party candidate Mr Bob Burgess apologised again yesterday for describing Australian citizenship ceremonies as 'de-wogging' occasions. (Age)
If number of citations is the criterion, then this one is a winner, since there were hundreds of them. But the hundreds of citations all appear to derive from this one incident, and they are almost entirely in 1996. The occasional later citation refers back to the 1996 incident. Is this a 'closet' term that only Mr Burgess dared to utter publicly, or did he make it up? Unless more independent uses of the term come to light, we are unable to include it in the dictionary since it does not satisfy the basic criteria for inclusion.
So what are some of the terms that have been added to this second edition of the Australian Oxford Dictionary? We added some 10,000 new words and meanings. Most of these are from the realm of international English, and for these international terms we rely on the research and resources of the dictionary department of Oxford University Press in the UK. Many of these additions are not especially exciting, but they are essential inclusions in a dictionary of this size. A small section of the letter M yields the following additions: maki sushi, Makonde, maia, malamute, malanga, malariology, Malayali, maldevelopment, maldistribution, maleate, malfatti, malik, malimbe, malkoha, malling, malolactic, malonate, malpresentation, maltase, maltodextrin, malware, mamelon, management buyout, managerialism, Mandan, maneb, maned wolf, manga, mangabey.
Others are in the more traditional category of 'new words', reflecting cultural and technological changes in recent years. From this source come new terms such as barista 'a person who makes coffee (esp. espresso) professionally', blog for weblog ('a personal website, on which an individual or groups of users record opinions, links to other sites, etc., on a regular basis'), cyberslacker 'a person who uses their employer's Internet and email facilities for personal activities during working hours', dirty bomb 'a bomb dispersed by conventional explosives but containing radioactive material', egosurf 'search the Internet for instances of one's own name or links to one's own website', MPEG 'an international standard for encoding and compressing video images' (acronym from Motion Pictures Experts Group ), SMS 'Short Message (or Messaging) Service', text message, and weapon of mass destruction.
Even so, there are some international words that the British dictionary (in this case the 2054 page Oxford Dictionary of English 2003) did not include. The British dictionary does not have the cycling terms criterium, domestique, and keirin, which have been in our dictionaries since 1997, perhaps reflecting a different level of public interest in professional cycling in Britain. Similarly, the fact that for this new edition of the Australian Oxford Dictionary we added from our own research the international terms people smuggling and sky marshal perhaps reflects Australian concerns. The term metrosexual was not in the British dictionary, probably reflecting the fact that while it has been in existence since 1994, it was not until 2003 that it really took off. We added it with the definition: 'a young, stylish, fashion conscious, consumer-oriented (esp. heterosexual) urban male'. Most dictionaries have not tapped into the sense of ripped when applied to muscles. Nor have they caught up with the new computing sense of the verb rip 'use a program to copy (sound or video data on a CD or DVD) on to a computer's hard drive'. One of my favourite international additions to this edition is the word mondegreen, defined as 'a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric'--as when 'Gladly the Cross I'd bear' is heard as 'Gladly the cross-eyed bear', or when the Beatles' 'a girl with kaleidoscope eyes' comes out as 'a girl with colitis goes by'. A website comments: 'Misheard lyrics come with many alternate names. ... The technical term prized by aficionados is mondegreen. If your dictionary doesn't include mondegreen, throw it out and buy a better one.' The term apparently arose from a mishearing of a line from a Scottish ballad. The line 'They have slain the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green' was heard as 'They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen'.
Finally, here are some of the new Australian entries in the dictionary, along with some of the evidence that helps to establish their validity and clarify their sense.
budgie smugglers
This term for a male Speedo-like swimming costume is a variant of the international term grape smugglers. The evidence is very recent, but it is widespread.
2002 It was all we could do not to look. But Mooney kept right at it, driving our impolite eyes back to his well-fitting 'man-skin', 'budgie smuggler' and 'lolly bag' as he described them. (Australian)
2003 But someone should have a word to him that it is not cool to walk down the main drag in Sydney's Bondi in the old budgie smugglers. (Herald Sun)
2004 But that's not the reason Thorpie wears his intimidating black suit; he reckons the old budgie-smugglers were a little too revealing. (Advertiser)
brick venereal
This is an Australian term that has been out there for some time, but has only recently been picked up by the dictionary makers. It was used by the novelist Kathy Lette in 1988: 'Most of this suburb suffers from brick venereal disease--blonde, brick double-garaged houses with pedicured lawns.' But it is only from the late 1990s that we have collected sufficiently detailed evidence for us to put it in the dictionary as an Australian term. It is defined as 'a derogatory term (playing on veneer/venereal) to describe a suburban brick-veneer house, or a housing development in which most of the houses are of a similar brick-veneer design'.
2000 Campion takes us back to that butt of a thousand jokes, the brick venereal vistas of Australia's less salubrious suburbs. Yet again we are shown the ludicrous naivety and vulgarity of our lower middle-class. (Australian)
2002 The unique characters of NSW towns are at risk from the spread of Sydney's ubiquitous 'brick venereal' project homes. (Sydney Morning Herald)
chop chop
1996 Chop chop--illegally processed tobacco--is readily available at pubs and parties, especially in the country's tobacco growing heartland in far north Queensland. (Courier-Mail)
2000 The tobacco industry reckons high prices are igniting sales of illegal 'chop chop' tobacco and the taxman is inclined to agree. (Australian Financial Review)
2003 The Auditor-General has called for tougher action to stem the loss of up to $450 million a year to the public purse from the black market in illegal tobacco or 'chop-chop'. (Canberra Times)
There is plenty of evidence for this term meaning 'illegal tobacco traded on the black market'. The term has nothing to do with chop chop meaning 'quickly quickly', a pidgin term from a Chinese dialect. Chop chop was used in Australia to describe chopped up fodder, sugar cane fibre, etc. for feed for stock, and this may be the origin of the term.
ute muster
This is a relatively recent term meaning '(especially in country towns) a gathering of utility trucks for display and competition'.
1999 The ute muster was part of a bigger Play on the Plains festival. (Weekly Times)
2003 The crowd revelled in the music at the ute muster. (Outback)
double plugger
This is 'a thong with an extra plug on either side where the thong attaches to the sole'.
1999 But Franklin also reveals how to create your own bogan. 'A mullet haircut, blue singlet, flannelette shirt and K Mart double plugger thongs', he says. (Herald Sun)
2002 Every living Australian, it seems, owns or has owned a pair of thongs. Not sandals, flip-flops, clogs or shower shoes, as some countries lay claim to them, but thongs--the cheap rubber double pluggers found in discount stores. (Australian)
2003 Even the traditional double plugger has gone trendy, with punters shelling out about $15 for brands such as Havianas, from Brazil, and Everlast. (Daily Telegraph)
seachanger
The ABC television program SeaChange ran from 1998 to 2000. It depicted a corporate lawyer who left her hectic city life and job for the quiet life of the seaside town Pearl Bay. While the program was showing, people who made a similar lifestyle change were being called seachangers.
1999 About 66 per cent of men over 45 were likely 'Seachangers', according to Morgan and Banks research. (Courier-Mail)
Even with the end of the program, the term continues to be used, and has an assured place in Australian English.
2002 Many Australians flock to the coast as seachangers. (Sunday Mail Brisbane)
2003 Braidwood is a place that is still attracting artists but also young families, seachangers and developers. (Canberra Times)
2004 Long before Sigrid Thornton packed up and moved to Barwon Heads, thousands of other would-be seachangers yearned for the year-round coastal lifestyle. (Geelong Advertiser)
So the term has entered the dictionary, defined as 'a person who makes a dramatic change in their lifestyle, especially by moving from the city to a seaside or country area'.
These are just some of the terms we added to the second edition of the Australian Oxford Dictionary and our reasons for adding them.