Parental concerns that Minions given as toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals have been dropping the F-bomb raises an issue: how far – if at all – should we go to prevent children from exposure to “bad” language?
Within Australia, there has historically been a clear social distinction between Cultivated (British-oriented) and Broad or General, distinctly Australian ways of speaking.
Liberalism is a dirty word for the majority of South Africans. This goes back to early colonialism. Liberals opposed apartheid but not the close relationship between capitalism and apartheid.
This Anzac Day the words “lest we forget” will often be spoken. It’s a usage that we don’t otherwise hear. Why do linguistic fossils such as “lest we forget” linger – and how do they help us remember the fallen?
The Macquarie Dictionary last week named “mansplain” its word of the year for 2014. The Dictionary defines mansplain as: verb (t) Colloquial (humorous) (of a man) to explain (something) to a woman, in…
Selfies were so 2013. But vaping’s in: Oxford Dictionaries have announced vape as its international Word of the Year 2014. The runners up are bae, budtender, contactless, indyref, normcore and slacktivism…
Writer Will Self grabbed headlines earlier this week by referring to George Orwell as the “Supreme Mediocrity”. He wrote: The curious thing is that while during the post-war period we’ve had many political…
Some years back, award-winning British journalist Robert Fisk wrote an article in which he stated the apparent tautology that “murder is murder”. Fisk was writing on Israel’s policy of “targeted killing…
The rate at which children learn language varies substantially from child to child. Some children show rapid vocabulary growth before they go to school, while others learn so slowly that they can end up…
Making sense of what is happening in our own time requires sharp thinking. Today, however, catch-phrases and clichés abound. More specifically we rely on cliches about generations. Journalists, bestselling…
As you may have seen, the Daily Telegraph blogger Tim Blair ran a much-tweeted-about poll yesterday asking: “Who is Australia’s craziest left-wing frightbat?”. Leaving aside the backlash, which was considerable…