(“Karen” got an honourable mention).Ĭhoices in years gone by have included robodebt, muffin top, fake news, and mansplain. Last year’s word of the year was “doomscrolling”: the practice of continuing to read news feeds online or on social media, despite the fact that the news is predominantly negative and often upsetting. In 2012, in the wake of former prime minister Julia Gillard’s speech in parliament on misogyny, then editor Sue Butler decided to broaden the definition of the word. Poet Les Murray was a contributor and editor who searched for new words to add – and submitted “poddledonk” (for a frog) and kiddy-fiddler (for a paedophile). Now in its eighth edition, it’s published by Pan Macmillan. For 11 years the project bounced around until it ended up at Macquarie University. Then there was the funding and the publishing model. Even the ABC had British-sounding presenters. Moore said the “cultural cringe was very real”. Our meanings for different words were there. They loved looking up ‘lay-by’ and finding it wasn’t just a bit on the side of the road as it is in British dictionaries but buying something on timed payments. “There were other dictionaries that had Australianisms, English dictionaries with ‘bonzer’ and ‘dinkum’ and ‘sheila’, but there hadn’t been a dictionary from the viewpoint of the Australian English speaker. Moore said it was a “terribly important moment” because it was the first dictionary of “unashamedly Australian English”. (Unfortunately the vice-chancellor at the time, Edwin Webb, was allergic, and left in a “fairly dreadful state”.)
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“There was a cocktail created – the Macquarie Cocktail – it has champagne, mango juice, Grand Marnier and a strawberry with the green left on, for the green, and the room was full of wattle ,” said Moore, who was then working in phonetics. Historian Manning Clark wrote in the introduction to that 1981 book that it was “evidence of the Australian contribution to the conversation of humanity”.Ī fractured federation? How the closing of state borders in the Covid crisis has raised old quarrelsĪuthor Thomas Keneally wrote shortly after it was published that the dictionary would “for the first time, declare that Australian English is not a bastard convict but a legitimate heir”.Īlison Moore – now the dictionary’s chief editor – was there on 21 September as the crowd raised their glasses to the grand enterprise at Macquarie University. (The word “bludger” made it in from the start – but “bogan” had to wait until the second edition.) Publication of the Macquarie was a symbolic ditching of colonial English and cultural cringe. Today marks 40 years since the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary – the first complete and truly Australian publication of its type – was launched. Photograph: National Library of Australia Obj.137986763 Dictionary’s publication symbolised the ditching of colonial English and cultural cringeĪrthur Delbridge, seated with the Macquarie Dictionary, and, from left, David Blair, John Bernard and Susan Butler in 1981.
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