Amanda Laugesen

'A hot novax summer: The influence of sport and Covid on Australian language' by Amanda Laugesen

April 2022, no. 441 • 23 March 2022

The Australian summer was once again a story of Covid. Just as things were slowly reaching a state of ‘Covid-normal’, Omicron came along to present us with new, decidedly unwelcome, challenges. Despite Omicron, our summer did not pass by without one of its most defining features: sport. Many events went ahead as planned, not least the Australian Open tennis tournament. ... (read more)

'Covidspeak revisited: The latest lexical mutations' by Amanda Laugesen

October 2021, no. 436 • 06 October 2021

More than a year ago, I wrote about how those of us interested in language were tracking the many words and expressions being generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, all of Australia was in iso, and we had all turned to the joys (for some of us) of isobaking or learning to crochet. As the pandemic has dragged on, the language generated by it has changed. The Covidspeak of 2021 reflects ou ... (read more)

'Apostrophe anarchy! For the love of punctuation' by Amanda Laugesen

July 2021, no. 433 • 23 June 2021

An email arrived in my inbox recently with an article from the British newspaper The Times. It was an obituary of John Richards, a former journalist and the man who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001. This organisation was dedicated to the protection of the apostrophe, ‘a threatened species’, according to Richards. He closed the Society down in 2019; aside from his age at the ti ... (read more)

'"The awful sense of loss": The language of climate grief' by Amanda Laugesen

May 2021, no. 431 • 26 April 2021

A little over a year ago, I was writing about the effects of the Black Summer of bushfires on our language. When Covid-19 hit, suddenly we were collecting the words of the pandemic. Despite the overwhelming focus on the pandemic (and its language) over the past year, the language of climate change has continued to evolve. My column on the Black Summer bushfires touched on the broader vocabulary of ... (read more)

'Blankety-blank: The art of the euphemism' by Amanda Laugesen

December 2020, no. 427 • 25 November 2020

Disguising the words we dare not print has a long and fascinating history. From the late eighteenth century in particular, it became common in printed works to disguise words such as profanities and curses – from the use of typographical substitutes such as asterisks to the replacement of a swear word with a euphemism. When I was researching my recent book, Rooted, on the history of bad language ... (read more)

'From swaggies to snapback' by Amanda Laugesen

September 2020, no. 424 • 24 August 2020

Financial crises, recessions, and times of high unemployment have periodically affected Australia. They have also shaped our vocabulary. The first recording of the iconic Australian word battler, in the sense of a person who struggles for a livelihood, was in 1896 by Henry Lawson in While the Billy Boils. The ‘swagman, itinerant worker’ sense of battler was first recorded in 1898. The verb to ... (read more)

'Coronaspeak: Tracking language in a pandemic' by Amanda Laugesen

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

Listen to this essay read by the author. The Covid-19 pandemic has affected all our lives, and little else has featured in the media for weeks. Unsurprisingly, this has led those of us who work with words to track the language of the pandemic (coronaspeak) closely. Here at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (temporarily WFH, of course), we have been compiling a database of the words emergi ... (read more)

Amanda Laugesen reviews 'Sounds and Furies: The love–hate relationship between women and slang' by Jonathon Green

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Kate Lister (historian and curator of the website Whores of Yore) writes in her foreword to Sounds and Furies that language ‘is a powerful agent of social control, and dictates the acceptable, the feminine, and the well behaved’. Slang lexicons have long served to objectify women in all sorts of ways. It is not surprising, she argues, that Green’s Online Dictionary of Slang records only twen ... (read more)

'Crisis lexicon' by Amanda Laugesen

March 2020, no. 419 • 21 February 2020

As I write this, Canberra is once again under threat from the Orroral Valley fire south of the city. This comes after a summer of intense and incredibly destructive bushfires and, for Canberra, endless days of smoke haze, followed by a damaging hailstorm. The coronavirus also dominates the daily newsfeeds as a global health emergency takes hold. Our public language in the last months has been tra ... (read more)

'Whither wowser?' by Amanda Laugesen

January–February 2020, no. 418 • 16 December 2019

Lexicographers, especially historical ones, are always interested in the way words fall in and out of fashion. But while we spend a lot of time tracing the first usage of a word and trying to figure out its origins, we pay much less attention to when or why a word falls out of common usage. Why do words cease to be used? For some words, the reason is clear. We no longer listen to gramophones or r ... (read more)