Not so long ago, the world was swept up in the all-consuming new gaming phenomenon of Pokémon Go. Unless you live in a very remote, secluded area, you will have seen the evidence of Pokémania… Read more…
A few years ago an executive from the McCann advertising agency approached me with an idea to document the process of the coining of a new word. He had a social phenomenon in mind for which he wished to find a word… Read more…
A friend of mine in Singapore reported that the Singaporean government has taken up the term pioneer to refer to anyone old enough to have contributed to Singapore’s early nationhood from 1955 onwards. Pioneers… Read more…
The grolar bear was added to the dictionary in 2015, and before you ask, no, we didn’t make it up. Read more…
Doomsday, Judgement Day, or the Apocalypse, whatever you want to call it, the strategy of being prepared for an unknown disaster is now becoming more and more a reality for some people. As I was flipping through the channels on TV the other night, I happened across an American reality show – Doomsday Preppers, profiling … Read more
The Australian Writers’ Centre recently held a competition asking for the best invented portmanteau. They awarded their winners, but we’ve trawled through the entries and found some favourites of our own. Read more…
Oxford University Press, in revising the headword list of their Junior Dictionary, gave rise to a discussion in the British press… Read more…
Spare a thought for the words that disappear from use because the thing they represent becomes outmoded. Read more…
Recently we discovered that some of us used the little word quite in quite different ways. Some of us were quite devastated by this. Read more…
The spelling gaol was the accepted spelling in Australian English until the 1990s… Read more…
