Australian Aboriginal place names

I took a trip on the Smartbus yesterday, pretending to be a tourist in my own city, and it was most enjoyable. A friend and I boarded the bus at Heidelberg and went to Mordialloc, breaking our journey at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

When we were sitting on the beach at Mordialloc, enjoying the overcast but warm day, I was struck by the fact that Mordialloc sounds as if it might be an indigenous place-name and that it phonetically resembles Woori Yallock, the name of a town in the Upper Yarra Valley.

When I looked on the Dictionary of Aboriginal Placenames in Victoria, I found that the traditional name for the beach I was sitting on was Murdayaluk, with murda meaning low/short and yaluk meaning river or creek.

Woori Yallock means running creek.

There were other places in the database with Yallock in the placename.

As I sat there, I wondered who had rested on this beach in the past, and how they had lived. And I wondered when they had told the newly-arrived Europeans what they should call the place.

Given that before the nineteenth century place names were recorded orally rather than in written form, I guess it's not surprising that the written forms of names were not consistent.

At the Victorian Government's Land Channel, it says:

The widespread use of Indigenous names provides a strong connection to our Indigenous heritage and acknowledges Indigenous culture. However some names may not be strictly accurate because of unfamiliarity with Indigenous language and culture at the time they were originally recorded.

Most of the Indigenous languages did not have a written form when Victoria’s places and features were being named under European settlement (although some Indigenous communities used message sticks to convey information between groups).

The people who first recorded fragments of these languages were not linguists paying careful attention to subtleties of pronunciation they were generally surveyors and explorers, who were usually the first Europeans to travel through the land and record names in their maps, charts and fieldbooks.

a new punctuation mark available for purchase

I've just read on Slavenka and Obi's blog about a new punctuation mark that is available for purchase. As it so succinctly suggests in the name, SarcMark, it's for letting readers know your sentence is sarcastic.

It might have been useful when a British woman said, "It's jolly decent of them to let me have a half share of my win,"as a court awarded her only part of the prize in a lottery after the winning ticket fell from her pocket and someone else claimed to have won.

Yes, that sentence could have benefited from a specific punctuation mark.

I looked at the YouTube commercial for the SarkMark and, at first, I thought the examples weren't actually sarcasm, because they were so unsubtle and heavy-handed. But when I visited The Online Etymology Dictionary, where there is a table of types of humor (from Fowler's Modern English Usage, 1926, I began to think the British woman's remark may have been sardonic rather than sarcastic, because they were possibly self-directed and aimed at dealing with adversity, rather than aimed at a victim or bystander and intended to wound.

The SarcMark YouTube examples certainly fit the definition of sarcasm at WordNet - expressing or expressive of ridicule that wounds.

I was thinking of downloading the symbol - it's only a couple of dollars - but now that I've become more aware of the hurtful aspect of sarcasm I'm not going to do so.

The poet, the murderer and the Global Financial Crisis

The Poet and the Murderer is the story of a forged Emily Dickinson poem and of the man who made it.

The forger, Mark Hofman, was brought up in the Mormon faith, but became disillusioned with what he saw as the hypocrisy of the leaders of his society, and eventually began to forge documents to discredit the whole movement. However, he may not have taken this direction if not for an interest in electroplating when he was fourteen. He changed the mint mark on a historic Mormon coin using electroplating and discovered no-one could tell it was a forgery.

On page 77 the author, Simon Worrall, writes this about the word credit:

The experience also showed Hofman that most people, unless they have strong evidence to the contrary, are extremely trusting. Above all, it taught him how thin is the membrane separating the real from the fraudulent. Value, he instinctively understood, is not absolute, but relative. Ultimately it depends on an agreed set of assumptions. Credit, it is worth noting, derives from the Latin word credere, to believe.

It seems to me that the recent global financial crisis also showed how thin is the membrane between belief and disbelief. As long as we all believed debts would be paid and that credit would be endlessly available, the world economy worked. As soon as we no longer believed in each other, the credibility of that system was lost.

What an important word that is: credit.

Shakespeare overtaken in the neologism stakes by the Simpsons?

In The Age newspaper yesterday Ken Nguyen wrote about the perils of quoting from the Simpsons; he sets out a range of possible faux pas, the worst of which is 'to use any of the early seasons' self-consciously manufactured catchphrases' - Eat my shorts, for instance.

I won't be likely to make this faux pas, as I don't know any phrases from The Simpsons.

Not consciously, that is. But I may be more influenced by this television program than I realise. Nguyen refers to a comment by Mark Liberman of Language Log that The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions.'

Liberman originally mentioned the idea only in passing, but it's spreading around the Net.

Considering that The Simpsons has now been around for twenty years I guess it could have had a massive impact on our vocabulary, but I'd doubt it could equal the huge number of nelogisms attributed to Shakespeare. Here's a piece from The Washington Post that quotes from Harper's Weekly:

If you had lived in Shakespeare's time you might not have ranked him as the best of the London dramatists. In the April issue of Harper's, Jonathan Bate explores how Shakespeare emerged to become the most famous writer in the world, and how his works have endured all the changes in taste and political fashion over the past four centuries. I can't find a (free) link to the story online, so I'm going to type in a passage on Shakespeare's neologisms. It's not true, Bate writes, that Shakespeare coined more English words than anyone else. But his coinage was still impressive:

'He gave us such verbs as "puke," "torture," "misquote," "gossip," "swagger," "blanket" (PoorTom's "blanket my loins" in Lear), and "champion" (Macbeth's "champion me to the utterance"). He invented the nouns "critic," "mountaineer," "pageantry," and "eyeball"; the adjectives "fashionable," "unreal," "blood-stained," "deafening," "majestic," and "domineering"; the adverbs "instinctively" and "obsequiously" in the sense of "behaving in the appropriate way to render obsequies for the dead." Many of Shakespeare's coinages are not new words but old words in new contexts (such as the application of "manager" to the entertainment business, with Midsummer Night's Dream's "manager of mirth") or new compounds or old words wrested to new grammatical usage. Although twenty-first-century electronic databases diminish the extent of Shakespeare's actual coinages, they immeasurably enrich our sense of the astonishingly multivalent, polysemous quality of his language.'

weeding the garden and pit verbs

Recently I was thinking about the verb to weed, so I was interested to read a post today on Language Log about verbs that mean removing the thing that is named, for instance to bone a piece of meat, to gut a fish or to string a bean.

The post also refers to pitting a cherry and says this is why this type of verb is called a pit verb. I would not use the word pit to refer to the seed in a cherry. I'd use the noun pip instead, and I think this is probably standard in Australia. But if I needed a verb for the action I'd say I was going to pit the cherries.

I definitely wouldn't say I was pipping cherries.

christmas wishes and seasonal wishes to everyone

On behalf of Penny and myself, I'd like to wish everyone a happy holiday season, no matter what kind of celebrations you have at this midsummer/midwinter season.

Best wishes for peace and joy.

when our choice of vocabulary changes our thinking

I used to hate weeding the garden. Now I don't mind, because I think of it as harvesting the weeds.

My attitude to this task alters with the use of a different verb.

I made this change in my vocabulary, and thus in my thinking, when I read a couple of books by Jackie French: Soil Food and Organic Control of Common Weeds. She believes weeds have a place in our gardens, because they stabilise disturbed ground and prepare it for other species to grow there when the time is ripe. In Organic Control of Common Weeds she writes that they are plants 'in conflict with human wishes... Deep rooted weeds can bring up leached elements from deep in the soil where shallower-rooted plants can't reach. As their leaves break down these nutrients are returned to the top soil where shallow-rooted plants can use them.'

In Soil Food she explains how to sink weeds into a bucket of water (with a lid so mosquitoes don't colonise) and wait for them to decompose. The liquid can then be watered down as a light fertiliser and the gunk in the bottom can be used as mulch.

Here are some weeds I happily collected today, ready to be plunged into water and covered.



And here are some that are ready to go back into the soil.



And here are more.



I now see my weeds as a resource and not a nuisance, all because of changing the words I use in thinking about them.

So what is the origin of the associated noun, weed? According to Linguistic Wonder Series in YourDictionary.com, originally in Old English we:od meant 'grass, herb, weed'.

So, I don't have to be frightened of the enormous task of pulling out the weeds in my garden. I can see it as an opportunity to return their nutrients to the soil.
If I persevere...