Search our site:
By Paul Mitchell There’s been a lot of talk about ‘sausage fests’ over the past few weeks, with the first all-female Miles Franklin shortlist sparking memories of the all-male lists of the recent…
Our Lunchbox/Soapbox guest last week was Michael Shmith. A senior writer and opera critic for the Age, specialising in arts journalism, he’s been immersed in the business of words for decades.Talkin…
Irritating Language I want to see banned. Immediately.Join Michael Shmith, Age Senior Writer and Opera Critic, for hi-jinks and hilarity, as he runs through his A-Z hitlist of terrible words and…
We recently reported on how the next edition Oxford Dictionary is to incorporate words such as sexting and woot. Now comes news that another major English-language dictionary, Collins, has announced …
Could the Prime Minister’s poll woes be linked to the words she uses? Sydney Morning Herald national reporter Jacqueline Maley has written an op-ed in the daily today suggesting the stiffness with…
The 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has been hauled into the 20th century, with a number of first-time additions to the dictionary reflecting the rise and rise of online…
Image via sivioco.com We already knew that birdsong changes over time as birds' environments change – hence this video of a bird imitating the ringing of a mobile phone…
Martin Amis on Don Quixote: “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and…
The Emerging Writers’ Festival ended last night with a spelling bee. It was won by Mel Campbell, who correctly spelled the word bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel, the most famous example of which …
Detail of a photograph from the book Arabic Graffiti The decorative potential of Arabic script is famous – the exteriors of the entrances of the Taj Mahal, for example…
The New York Times Magazine has published a list of words and phrases its readers most despise. The magazine’s readers were invited to write to the magazine with their pet word peeves following a
Q, the equal-highest point-earning letter in Scrabble and one of five that appear just once, via WikiCommons A book designed to settle disputes is bound to provoke many…
This post, on the linguistic origins of Moomba, is by Piers Kelly. It was originally published yesterday on Crikey’s Fully Sic blog, a blog devoted to all things language-related.At Melbourne’s very …
How does an expression of uncertain provenance and contested spelling, for which each language already has its own long-standing version, take over the world? Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The…
The 2010 Gala brought together twelve of our finest writers and storytellers. Their stories celebrated the diversity and depth of our City of Literature, a city built on voices from elsewhere.This…
NPR science correspondent Robert Krulwich has published a piece on the various contenders for the prestigious title of the longest word in English.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the behemoths of the…
Click to watch video. What does German hip hop sound like? How has the re-unification of one of Europe’s oldest cultures brought out new artforms?In this…
Macquarie Dictionary is reviewing the words of 2011 and asking for people to vote on their favourite word of the year. The list makes for a fascinating picture of what interested us in the last 12…
Last week we offered some untranslatable words that you might use on holidays and our commenters came back with some even better suggestions including some home-grown suggestions.One anonymous…
Before you jet off on holiday, you might want to pack a few untranslatable words to get you through those times when using the English words – only LOUDER – just won’t cut it.Matador network offer a …
Translation is like being a shadow novelist according to Maureen Freely who has translated the works of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.Freely herself a writer was initially concerned that translation w…
If your finger hovers over the “a” key after writing “ok” then you’re not alone. Roy Blount from the New York Times recently puzzled over what the correct spelling was.Blount traces the first use of …
Sarah Palin’s linguistic skills have been given the highest honour as the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked her made-up refudiate as the 2010 Word of the Year.Palin first used the word when s…
Click to watch video. Geoffrey Rush called him “the Sergeant Pepper of cryptic crosswords” but crossword maker David Astle dances with words daily. If you e…
Bas Böttcher, Wladimir Kaminer and Carsten Beyer offer a glimpse of contemporary Berlin, in a night of reading and talk hosted by the award-winning author of Stasiland, Anna Funder.In Partnership…
The Guardian’s pass notes series takes on one of the most basic units of our vocabulary, “the”, and wonders about its future.Mostly they’ve noticed that the definite article is disappearing in…
Dr Samuel Johnson has been an active Twitterer for some time but recently he has published a new dictionary based on our modern world.Of course, it’s a fake but as an extract from the Quietus shows, …
Born in Moscow, Wladimir Kaminer emigrated to Berlin in the early 90s when he was 22. Russian Disco is a series of short and comic autobiographical vignettes about life among the migrants in the…
Crossword puzzlers know him as DA, but setter David Astle has had a lifelong fascination with words. In conversation with Michael Williams, Astle talks about his love of words that has drawn him…
Meet Sebastian. He doesn’t talk much. In fact he hasn’t spoken since we met. The strong silent type, Sebastian has a round head and lean flanks. He hails from Sweden, along with Gilbert, who lives…
Over at the ever-informative OUP blog, Anatoly Liberman is wrestling with what he calls a “ubiquitous modern parasite”: the word “like”. He chronicles the rise of the word as though it were a virus m…
His short fiction has appeared in Sleepers, Heatwave and On The Edge, and his features were once a regular part of Sunday Life magazine, tackling such diverse topics as Jimmy Barnes and fridge…
