Lake Superior State University in the US publishes a list of ‘banished words’– terms that have been so misused or overused that they should be put out to pasture and dropped from our vocabularies (at least for a while). They’ve been doing this since 1976. It started out as a bit of fun for their serious linguists, but over the years it has morphed into a valuable guide tracking the ways in which our language is being abused. At the top of their list this year is ‘GOAT’. If you haven’t come across this before, it’s an acronym for ‘Greatest Of All Time’. It is the flying thumbs of the mad texters that have made this irritating expression so common in recent months – but, fond though they are of abbreviations, they didn’t invent it. The diligent scribes at the Oxford English Dictionary have tracked it back to 1965 and its invention by American sportswriters. It remained part of the jargon of sweaty change-rooms until the txt community got hold of it as another abbreviation to toss around – and proceeded to toss it incessantly. Used correctly (if it ever could be!) it would tell us that Don Bradman is the GOAT of cricket and Margaret Court is the GOAT of women’s tennis. But do we really want to say that? To call someone a goat has never been a compliment – and when saying this acronym out loud it’s not possible to hear the ‘all caps’ construction. So the university is right to lead its banished words list with GOAT. Furthermore, I suspect it’s dying among the hipsters. I first encountered GOAT on a TV commercial for packaged holidays – and once the advertising industry has got hold of a word it has ceases to be trendy (or anything close to trendy).

The Aussie word ‘bunyip’ has recently turned up on an American dictionary website – in a surprising context. As you know the ‘bunyip’ is an imaginary monster (in Aboriginal legends) who hangs around billabongs and swamps. The word ‘bunyip’ comes from the Wemba-Wemba people of western Victoria, and is first recorded in 1845. That reference is to a large fossilised bone that had been discovered, quite possibly a bone from a diprotodont – a very large marsupial that once inhabited the swamps and waterways of Australia, and that became extinct some thousands of years ago. In fact, the diprotodont may be the source of the whole bunyip legend. Early settlers may have used the legend of the bunyip to frighten their children into not wandering away from lonely bush settlements. That’s the background. So, imagine my surprise when I found ‘bunyip’ on the Merriam-Webster dictionary website listed as one of ‘nine names for imposters’. Most of the words on their list wouldn’t surprise you (charlatan, fraudster, fake and so on). But there in the middle of their list is: ‘bunyip’. And, sure enough, when I double-check I discover that from 1852 ‘bunyip’ was (occasionally) employed to mean ‘imposter’. Someone called G.C. Mundy in that year, in a book called, Our Antipodes, wrote that ‘bunyip’ was ‘a Sydney synonym for impostor, pretender, humbug, and the like’. A year later the legendary William Charles Wentworth (the first of that name) said much the same in his book Fifty Years of Australian History. But would anyone use it that way today? If you wanted to call someone an impostor would you say they were a ‘bunyip’? It seems unlikely. So, I take it this is an Australian metaphor that had its day and has died out.