Aussie Life
Aussie life
A younger cohort of visitors is heading for Bowen, best known hitherto as the home of the Big Mango, a…
Language
Here is a delightful phrase which may well become a familiar idiom in English language: ‘weather dependent economy’. I encountered…
Aussie life
Coined, as it was, by a dead white man whose oeuvre is considered one of the crowning achievements of Western…
Language
No language column can ignore Professor Brendan Murphy’s extraordinary 78-word definition of ‘woman’. As you know, when he was questioned…
Aussie life
Perhaps we could pay tribute to the US Supreme Court’s courageous decision to remove an entitlement to wholesale abortion that…
Language
Is it time to revisit how we define the word ‘racism’? Early in the 20th century the settled definition became…
Aussie life
It’s too soon to say whether President Biden’s response to the carnage in Tulsa, Uvalde and Buffalo (‘For God’s sake,…
Language
We live in a world that seems to have largely abandoned punctuation – those small marks between words that help…
Aussie life
When the Minister for Blackouts, Bankruptcy and Bull finally announces that, in order to save the planet, we need to…
Language
The word ‘emergency’ has been part of the English language since around 1630. Its most common political use today is…
Aussie life
I have a confession to make. Despite voting for an Australian Republic in 1999, and despite making an ad arguing…
Aussie life
In last Saturday’s Weekend Australian, Professor Peter Sutton, an internationally recognised anthropologist and linguist, wrote ‘Indigenous identity has become such…
Language
‘Bike shedding’ was coined by British historian and author C. Northcote Parkinson, famous for his book Parkinson’s Law (1957), but…
Aussie life
I’m starting this column on the eve of the election, so you have me at a disadvantage. But not much…
Language
News reports tell us there has been a small furore over a list of ‘derogatory and offensive terms’ included in…
Aussie life
The education of the young is an essential component for the transmission of culture from one generation to the next.…
Language
We all know ‘adult’ the noun, and we know what an ‘adult’ is (‘because,’ as a friend said to me,…
Aussie life
Are conservative journalists more endangered than polar bears? Unlike the habitat of the world’s largest land carnivore, the landscape across…
(Pro-) Aussie life
‘We are not changing any of the settings and I don’t believe we need to change any of the settings’…
Aussie life
In The Australian Ugliness, published in 1960, the architect Robin Boyd remembered a meal in a hotel dining room in…
Language
Now a new and (I think) much needed expression: ‘disagreement consent’. It’s a play on a more familiar expression I…
Aussie life
The failure of Russian forces to achieve their Ukrainian objectives is said to have surprised nobody more than their commander-in-chief.…
Language
The current prominence of the word ‘gaffe’ is due to the Gaffe Meister himself – Joe Biden. But on investigation…
Aussie life
Of the 101 Australian military personnel who have been awarded the Victoria Cross, our highest honour for bravery, most lie…
Language
Here it is! I have finally found one word that will describe the Liberal party in its present state— ‘agathokakological’.…
