I was asked by a colleague the other day about the phrase on accident – as in to have done something on accident – and where this has come from. He had heard someone say that something was done on accident, but he was adamant that the ‘correct’ phrase is by accident. Traditionally speaking, the phrase is by accident. The variant on accident is … Read more
It’s a dog-heavy list, but we know a lot of people like it that way. When we look through our words to watch, often submitted by you for consideration in the Macquarie Dictionary, we enjoy hearing new coinages as well as words that may have been around for a while but are getting more and more popular. … Read more
Put on your daggiest duds because we are exploring all things daggy in this week’s Aussie Word of the Week…
Cooee, the sound of the great Australian contact call was adopted by the first European colonists from the Dharug language and people of the Sydney area…
Usually associated with New Zealand’s North Island, in Australian Slang, the ‘North Island‘ is used by Tasmanians as an ironic nickname for that big chunk of land that sits across the Bass Strait…
A wee juggler is a slang name for the Major Mitchell, a cockatoo with white wings, pink underparts, neck and face, and white crown suffused with salmon pink and forward-curving scarlet crest…
You may remember a few weeks ago when we featured wombat-headed as our Aussie Word of the Week. Well this week we have another great Aussie insult. Pie-eater...
Words that have been borrowed into English from Australian Indigenous languages have often followed a circuitous path, beset by failures in communication between the Indigenous peoples and the colonisers. The legend of kangaroo has become a kind of symbol of this narrative, but we see it to varying degrees in the etymology of many words. Like dingo, which comes … Read more
It is a myth that is, despite being debunked in the 1970s, still rampant – still passed smugly between schoolchildren in playgrounds all over Australia. It was certainly something I believed for a long time, and is still circulated in popular culture, including in the 2016 blockbuster Arrival – a film with a linguist protagonist, … Read more
Prawn has been a part of Australian slang since the 1890s, to call someone a prawn is to call them a fool or jerk…
