British journalist Richard Godwin has alerted me to what may be the trendiest word of the moment: ‘namecore’. This is the trend of giving a name to every trend! The actual naming trend has been around for a while – we’ve seen it in the naming of various groups over the years: mods, rockers, hippies, beatniks, yuppies, nimbys, snags and all the rest of them. Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London, says: ‘Every day virtually there’s a new kind of micro culture, micro niche, aesthetic or vibe, and what is happening, in a way, is not new at all. It’s happened many times in popular culture in the past.’ But it now has this name – ‘namecore.’ So, if you are in ‘goblin mode’ or responding to ‘clickbait’ you can name those things because of the ‘namecore’ trend. Richard Godwin concludes that: ‘Namecore is a stupid, made-up word which describes the trend of giving stupid, made-up names to stupid, made-up trends.’ I suspect everyone in Speccie land would agree!

Anthony Albanese has announced his referendum on the Voice. The word ‘referendum’ is recorded in English since 1744. It comes from a classical Latin source word behind which is the idea of ‘refer.’ So, a ‘referendum’ is a decision being referred by the government back to the people of Australia. When our constitution was written, the intention was that it should be difficult to change (otherwise we’d see it being changed, and then changed back again, year in year out). That’s why our founders decided that politicians should not be allowed to change the constitution themselves – instead they had to ‘refer’ such a move to the people. And a change can only be approved with a majority of votes in a majority of states. That makes doing anything by constitutional referendum a slow, tortuous, and expensive way of acting. Which is why it puzzles me that advocates of the Voice want to do this by referendum when it could be done immediately by legislation. We are told the Voice will be an advisory body. Well, there are lots of advisory bodies, and all of them have been established by legislation. None of them were written into the constitution. Instead of ‘referring’ this back to the population, thus making it a permanent part of our constitution, why doesn’t the Albanese government just legislate to create the Voice? End of problem!

The point has often been made that the Left eat their own. They are now so prescriptive about what people are allowed to believe and allowed to say that anyone who deviates from their prescribed line (on any issue) is written off (and attacked on social media). One example of this is the word ‘terf,’ This is an acronym of the phrase ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. So a ‘terf’ is a woman who advocates for the rights of women, but who believes that someone who is born a man cannot be a real woman, and does not have a right to compete in women’s sports or share women’s facilities (toilets, change-rooms etc.). Australia’s own internationally famous feminist Germain Greer has been blacklisted by the Left as a ‘terf’. The same has happened to J.K. Rowling, creator of the world of Harry Potter (the books that got a whole generation of children reading). And I’m sure there have been many others. The position they hold strikes many people as entirely reasonable, particularly when a man who identifies as a woman still has a penis and wants to enter a women’s toilet, or change room, or refuge, or even prison. But as we know, the Left are the modern equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. The proof is the very existence of this word ‘terf’.