The new edition of the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary has…

SEXY WORDS 

‘Sexy’ in the non-sexual sense ‘exciting, trendy’ first appeared in international English in the 1950s, and has of course been in our dictionaries for some time. When a new edition of a dictionary appears, the ‘sexy’ ones receive most attention, since these are the features of the new edition that are often picked up by the popular press. This time, one of the sexy words contains the word ‘sex’: sexting ‘the sending of sexually explicit material by mobile phone.’ Among the new words, perhaps the most recent to make a worldwide impact, is swine flu ‘a form of influenza in humans caused by a virus that occurs in pigs’.  Until recently, only birds twittered and tweeted, but advances in technology have produced a new twitter (‘a social networking site on the Internet’) that has made its way into the dictionary, along with tweet as both verb (‘send a message to’) and noun (‘a posting on the twitter social networking site’). The metrosexualisation of the world of men has generated the term bromance (a blend of bro and romance) to describe ‘an intimate non-sexual relationship between two men’. The term weblog, ‘a personal website, on which an individual or groups of users record opinions, links to other sites, etc., on a regular basis’, was first recorded in 1997, and found its way into the 2004 edition of the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary. Soon after, the abbreviated form blog began to be used widely, and this form now appears in this new edition. Blog is joined by its numerous derivatives, including: blogosphere ‘personal websites and weblogs collectively’; blogroll ‘a list of links to other blogs or websites’; moblog ‘a weblog that consists of pictures and other content posted from mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, etc.’ (a blend of mobile + blog); and vlog ‘a blog with most of the content in the form of video clips’ (a blend of video + blog).

The global financial crisis of the past eighteenth months has generated a new interest in financial terminology, and new financial terms have found their way into the dictionary: thus hedge fund ‘an investment fund, typically formed as a private limited partnership, often using credit or borrowed capital and various hedging strategies to limit the effect of market movements on returns’; Ponzi scheme ‘a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a non-existent enterprise is fostered by payment of quick returns to first investors using money invested by others’ (from the name of Charles Ponzi (1882-1949), who perpetrated such a fraud in 1919-20); and subprime ‘of or relating to credit or loan arrangements for borrowers with a poor credit history, typically having unfavourable conditions such as high interest rates since the borrowers do not qualify for prime rates or conditions’. Popular culture provides w00t (usually written with two zeros rather than two o’s), an expression of triumph or excitement, originally used in Internet gaming and role-playing sites, va-va-voom (‘the quality of being exciting, vigorous, or sexually attractive’), and the acronym wag (‘a wife and/or girlfriend of a sports player’). Closer to home lexically, hornbag (‘a sexually attractive person’) finally gets a guernsey, as does the more recent not happy Jan!

WEB WORDS

In the previous two editions of this dictionary, the new words were often associated with computing and electronic communication, and these areas continue to generate many new terms. In addition to the terms mentioned above, these include: cloud computing ‘the use of Internet-based servers rather than local servers’; cyberchondriac ‘a person who excessively self-diagnoses their state of health with reference to Internet medical sites’; data smog  ‘an overwhelming excess of information, esp. that obtained as the result of an Internet search’; defriend ‘delete (someone) from a list of friends or contacts associated with a weblog or electronic list’; and wiki  ‘a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content’ (probably from Hawaiian wiki ‘fast, quick’).

WARM WORDS

In this edition, one of the striking aspects of the new words is the number of them that derive from environmental and ecological concerns, especially the effects of global warming. These include: agroterrorism ‘terrorist attacks aimed at disrupting or damaging a country's agriculture’; biocentrism ‘the view or belief that the rights and needs of humans are not more important than those of other living things’; carbon footprint ‘the amount of carbon dioxide produced as the result of the activities of a particular person, group, etc.’; climate canary ‘a small negative change in the natural world that portends a greater catastrophe’ (from the earlier tradition of miners taking a caged canary into a mine to warn of the presence of toxic gases, which would kill the canary before affecting the miners); food mile ‘a unit of measurement of the amount of fuel required to transport foodstuff from producer to consumer’ (and note that food kilometre has not taken hold in Australia); freegan ‘a person who seeks to help the environment by reducing waste, esp. by retrieving and using discarded food and other goods’ (a blend of  free + vegan); geosequestration ‘the underground storage of carbon dioxide that has been compressed into a near-liquid state’; greenwash (formed on whitewash) ‘misleading information disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image’; and locavore ‘a person who mainly eats food grown or produced locally’ (on the pattern of carnivore, herbivore, etc.).

AUSSIE WORDS

This edition has given us the opportunity to include some older Australian terms that had not found their way into the earlier editions. Some of them are self-evidently Australian: Blue Hills ‘used allusively to refer to anything that is long-running or long-lasting’ (from the name of a serial that ran for 5979 episodes on ABC radio from 1949 to 1976); brown joey ‘a member of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, an order founded by Mother Mary MacKillop (d. 1909), whose members wear brown habits’; and a cup of tea, a Bex, and a good lie down ‘a jocular phrase used by or of a person to indicate that they need to take time out to solve a problem etc.’ (originally the title of a revue at the Phillip St Theatre in Sydney in 1965; ‘Bex’ was a proprietary name for an analgesic in powder form).

Other terms are included now because research has revealed that they are in fact Australian, although not many people would suspect that they are: bolar (often as bolar blade or bolar roast) ‘a cut of beef adjacent to the blade’ (perhaps from its roll-like shape); Boston bun  ‘a large yeast bun topped with white or pink icing and coconut’ (perhaps through association with the American city of Boston, but the connection is unclear); bunny rug ‘a baby’s blanket’ (bunny rugs exist in other countries, but they all have pictures of bunnies on them; in Australia, a bunny rug no longer needs to have such a picture); Disneyland ‘(esp. in sports after a blow to the head) a state of dizziness or unconsciousness’ (from the notion of Disneyland as an unreal place, enforced by the similarity of sound between ‘Disney’ and ‘dizzy’);  display home ‘a newly-built home that is available for inspection to encourage viewers to sign a contract for the building of a similar home’; the duck’s guts ‘something extremely impressive; the best of its kind’ (like standard English the cat’s whiskers); and parents’ retreat ‘a section of a house where parents can have privacy from their children’.

More recent Australian terms include: babychino, barbecue stopper, boganism, bowlo, chook chaser, chroming, dividend imputation, dunny budgie, flum, hoon laws, jeff, mortgage stress, mungo, mystery bag, Ozmas, pizzling, schmick, spunk bubble, tradie, tree change, welcome to country, and wogspeak. There are also many new terms for flora and fauna from Aboriginal languages, such as: ampurta, antina, djoongari, goodoo, itjaritjari, karak, magabala, moort, pombah, pondi, rakali, ulcardo, walpurti, and yolla. If you don’t know some of these terms, you clearly need a new edition of the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary.

BRUCE MOORE

EDITOR OF THE AUSTRALIAN CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY

& DIRECTOR OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL DICTIONARY CENTRE