The word of the moment is undoubtedly ‘monocultural’. In her take-no-prisoners speech at the National Press Club Pauline Hanson said it was time to axe multiculturalism ‘We cannot be a multicultural society,’ she said. ‘We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.’  This triggered brain explosions among those who are terrified by the advance of One Nation.

Does it mean having a North Korean-style culture tsar to rule on what’s in and what’s out? Because that’s the kind of hysterical over reaction provoked by the word ‘monocultural’.

Stop the panic! All that ‘monocultural’ means is ‘shared culture’.

The word ‘monoculture’ (and its cognates) appears in English from 1901 – at first only as an agricultural term. When a farmer grows one crop, when that crop is shared by a farm full of adjacent paddocks, it was called a ‘monoculture’. Only in 1968 was this extended to human beings – to mean a population group that shared a culture.

That shared culture might be shallow and ugly (gang culture in Los Angeles) or rich, deep and inspiring (the Italian culture, the Japanese culture).

Can Australians have a truly shared culture? Yes.

It was our greatest poet Les Murray in his verse novel The Boys Who Stole the Funeral who nailed our shared culture by calling it ‘the common pot’.  It started in 1788 with the arrival of 18th-century British culture. And almost the first thing that culture did was to adopt a whole lot of Aboriginal language – especially to name the strange flora and fauna, but other cultural terms quickly blended in: words such as ‘boomerang’ and ‘corroboree’ became part of the Australian language.

The experience of life in the bush contributed notions of mateship, and a kind of honesty that is ‘fair dinkum’. In the 1850s (with the gold rushes) and again in the 1950s (after the second world war) the floodgates opened to people from around the world. And they didn’t just come, they shared. They contributed to the ‘common pot’ and made us all a bit richer, a bit more Australian.

So, perhaps ‘monocultural’ is not a Big Bad Wolf of a word that we should all be afraid of? Unless, of course, there are some who decide it must be wrong because it was Pauline Hanson who raised it. But we can safely ignore them – they are just suffering from PDS (Pauline Derangement Syndrome).

Speccie reader Aileen asks about the old expression ‘dead as a doornail’. And it’s very old – going as far back as 1350. But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Partly because of the repetition of sounds (the alliterative Ds made it memorable). And it comes from a period where external doors were heavy timber objects, held together by large, steel nails. Plus, if you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t re-use it. Medieval doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength.