Motto of the day: Nullius in verba

Surely the organisation with absolutely the best motto is the Royal Society? Nullius in verba, according to the Wikipedia, means “Take nobody’s word for it”; it is Latin for “on the word of no-one”. John Evelyn and other Fellows of the Royal Society choose the motto soon after the Society was founded, 350 years ago. The Royal Society explains the motto this way:

It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.

The phrase came from Horace's Epistle to his benefactor Maecenas. These are his words

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, – quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.
("(being) not obliged to swear allegiance to a master, wherever the storm drags me to, I turn in as a guest.") 

It is hard to think of a better motto – a challenge to make us all sit up and think, as the Royal Society says.

Word of the Day - Hundge

Our currency has always attracted friendly nicknames, but this nickname for the $100 note is new to me. It was the heading in an article in Crikey, by Liam Apter. The article included an interview with Swinburne’s Professor Steve Worthington. The idea is apparently being floated that the $100 note be withdrawn because of its use in the black economy, amongst criminals, and to transport large sums of cash.

Cash out: why does the govt want to ban the hundge?

Crikey | 16 December 2016
Adjunct Professor Steve Worthington comments on why the Australian government has proposed to remove the $100 note from circulation. 

There are common nicknames for our currency, such as the well-known terms lobster (the $20 note) and pineapple (the $50). But I have never heard of a hundge, and I thought that Crikey may have invented it.

However, the Urban Dictionary defines the term as meaning a $100 note in US usage and gives the alternative spelling hunge. There is no example of use in Australia, other than the Crikey article; the Wikpedia article on slang terms for Australian money doesn’t mention it.

Notes of this denomination represent almost half of the value of all Australian banknotes, but how often do you see one? ATMs do not usually issue them. Their rarity in actual use makes it less likely that an affectionate slang term would arise, but perhaps I move in the wrong circles.

Idiom of the day - Zip it

This is taken from an article in The New Daily, an online Australian newspaper, which appeared in December last year. The occasion was the election of a new leader (Bill English) and deputy leader of the National Party. The newly-elected (by her party) deputy leader of the NZ National Party was Paula Bennett, referred to as “former teen solo mum Paula Bennett”. 

The idiomatic expression (or metaphor) used by Paula Bennett was zip-it. You can watch the episode in which she used the expression in a clip from Parliament, linked from an article in the New Zealand Herald. There was some discussion of the appropriateness of a Minister using the expression “zip it, sweetie”, as she did, but the Speaker decided that the usage was trivial, and disallowed the comments.

There was no discussion of the pronounciation of the consonants in “zip it”, which would have aroused comment in Australia, as would the expression “a bit of a difference”, also used by the Minister. 

The Auckland Herald made the expression its top quote of 2012. when the incident took place in the New Zealand Parliament. 

According to the Cambridge dictionary, “zip it” is “a rude and angry way of telling someone to stop talking”, with this example given: Just zip it - I'm tired of listening to you complain. This wasn’t the interpretation given by the Speaker of the NZ Parliament. The zip (a closure device) features in quite a few idioms or metaphors, as does its verb form (“to fasten with a zip”). 

The Urban Dictionary traces the term back to about 1988, when it was used by a notorious talk-show host in the United States, Morton Downey Jr.

Word of the Day - Invisibilised

I was watching the television news last week, and was intrigued to hear Professor Rosalind Croucher, the head of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), use the word invisibilised. The ALRC is conducting an enquiry into elder abuse, and has just issued a discussion paper on the topic, according to the ABC News. 

Professor Croucher was being interviewed in connection with a news item about aged people being robbed by their children and other loved ones. "People describe powers of attorney as a licence to steal," she said in the interview.

In the course of her comments, Professor Croucher used the term invisibilised, which appears to be a nice verbing of the adjective invisible. 

But it isn't a neologism. It has been used for some years in a clinical context. Heaslip & Ryden, in their book Understanding Vulnerability, include a section on invisibilisation which refers to invisibilising of vulnerable people in care. Like this 

"Ahmed is on a cardiac ward awaiting an angiogram. Each day the hurses/carers come along to make his bed. Ahmed is asked to sit out on the chair beside the bed, whilst the health carers make the bed. They engage in a discussion about their own lives and what they did the night before. At no point is Ahmed invited to join the conversationnor is there any eye contact with him to suggest he might be involved. The health carers complete the bed and move on to the next bed, with a cursory nod to indicate Ahmed can sit back on his bed."

And the French verb, invisibiliser, meaning to render invisible, has been used since the mid-19th century, with much the same meaning. In English, according to the NGRAM, it has been used only since 1980.

So a word with a specialised niche meaning has been given a wider currency. The rapid rate of growth in use seems likely to continue, unless people stop invisibilising old, ill and other vulnerable people. 

Word of the Day - Verb

Today's word is verb, used as a verb. I quote a Facebook post from Christine Mackenzie, "Is there any word which can't be verbed?" 

She gave this lovely example "The strategy, helmed by major shareholder James Packer." And in return Susan Bray quoted Shakespeare "they heroed me" from KJulius Caesar. And I said that I was too sydneyed out to think of an answer.

What is the answer? Perhaps we should accept the inevitability of verbing, and see if there might be rules which can make it possible to verb any word in the English language - as long as it is not already a verb, of course. Perhaps the last word should go, for now, to Anthony Gardner writing in The Economist a few years ago about verbing, or more correctly, denominalisation. Not the real last word - that will be the last word to be verbed. Gardner gives two nice examples from the sixteenth century:

Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.

I've decided to revive this blog. I will continue to look at neologisms, but I have become quite fascinated lately by idioms, metaphors, similes, figures of speech and the like. Send me your favourite examples, and I'll tell you all about them in this blog.

Thank you Chris.

Word of the day - niche

Today's word is niche, used as a verb. In fact, used at a meeting that I recently attended, in the sentence "We have to niche up some of the messages." It is interesting that niche seems to take the preposition "up" although it could just as well have taken the opposite - "niche down". 

Dictionary.com accepts niche as a verb and gives the brief definition "to place [something] in a niche." Google's definition search facility amplifies this definition: Place or position (something) in a niche: "these elements were niched within the shadowy reaches"; "decorated with niched statues". (NB: to use the Google definition search, you just type in the word and add the word "definition", e.g. "irony definition").

The meaning of the illustrative sentence I have given you is that we must position ourselves with a wide range of interested groups, even though they may be small, by targeting our messages more explicitly. I guess that's a good idea.

Word of the day

Today's word is caveat, used as a verb. Used in a meeting right here, yesterday. But I loved it at first sight. In fact, this usage goes back some time. 

We all know what a caveat is in normal usage - it is used in the sense of a qualification or warning, a limitation to a statement's face value meaning. It is from Latin, and is used in Latin expressions such as caveat emptor (let the buyer beware).

Here's an example from the Wiktionary of this usage, from former US Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, famous for his creative use of English: 'I'll have to caveat my response, Senator, and I'll caveat that' - from Robert McCrum's The Story of English.

The legitimacy of Haig's usage as been debated, but as McCrum says, he was simply displaying the virtuosity of English, if not its grace. Don't caveat me, and I won't caveat you.