October will be an exciting month for us at the Dictionary Centre. The international conference ‘Who’s Centric Now? The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes’, hosted by Oxford University Press, the Australian National Dictionary Centre, and the Humanities Research Centre, will be held at the Australian National University from the 27th to the 29th of October. There will be papers on the Englishes of Australia (including Aboriginal English), Bangladesh, Britain, Canada, Fiji, India, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and the USA.

During the conference a major new dictionary, edited at the Centre, will be launched by the Hon. E.G. Whitlam. This is the Australian Oxford Dictionary.A distinctive feature of this new dictionary is its encyclopedic material. It includes substantial entries on people, places, events, etc., and has short essayish entries on topics ranging from Aborigines to Zulus.

This number of Ozwordsincludes articles by Kate Burridge and Roly Sussex. Kate’s article on swearing is timely indeed, given the decision of a Dubbo Local Court magistrate (on the 22nd of August) to dismiss ‘an offensive language charge against an 18-year-old man’ on the grounds that ‘the word "f---" had become extremely commonplace and had lost most of its punch’ (Canberra Times2 September 1999).

I shall be delighted to receive more articles from our readers.

Frederick Ludowyk
Editor, Ozwords