Language, pronunciation and perhaps even spellings all tell a story of an evolving Australian culture

Always evolving: language changes in interesting ways

I like words. I love punctuation. I cannot abide misspellings. I take note of how words are formed, used, paired and, sadly, abused. Remarkably few people, I have found, can correctly spell The Philippines. In corporate presentations I will note, quietly, inconsistencies in the use of punctuation between slides. Words should not be capitalised or italicised willy-nilly and, please, single exclamation marks only!

I am obsessed with the geography of words. Why do we fall in love? Is love a valley? And why do we say that someone has fallen pregnant? Surely these are positive concepts that should occupy the aspirational sunny uplands of our minds.

We’re in two minds about debt. It is either a mountain which burdens us, or a body of water within which we are apt to drown. We rise to an occasion. We catch Covid. We suffer adversity. We drown our sorrows.

Territory is uncharted. Ambition is unbridled. Love can blossom, it can be kindled, it can flicker, it can be extinguished. How appropriate that perhaps the most powerful of human emotions is likened in our minds to fire. Hate, on the other hand, festers like an infected sore.

Climate change is forever being tackled. It is never, for example, being corralled, let alone being stopped dead in its tracks as it should be. And I suspect the reason is that tackling is a mightily convenient term. To stop climate change is a promise. To address climate change is wishy-washy. To tackle climate change suggests action without necessarily promising an outcome. Perfect!

Words come into and out of fashion. The modern-day word equivalent of a 1970s pair of flares is, I think, “eye-watering”, which seems to be the newsreader’s preferred phrase when describing the scale of national debt, the state of house prices and the enormity of lotto wins. In due course eye-watering will recede and become nought but a 2020s curiosity in a museum of common parlance.

Prior to the recent election campaign, I confess, I’d never heard the word “polity”. Surely polity is a made-up word, I thought. It looks like, and it sounds a bit like, potty. At first I thought it was a misprint. Then I realised polity is a real word that has entirely escaped my finely tuned word radar all these decades. Polity may well have been known even by people who don’t know how to correctly spell The Philippines! I am mightily unnerved by this experience. What other words commonly accepted by others do I not know?

In the early 1990s it became fashionable to discuss the state of one’s relationship. (Were you in a good relationship? Or did your relationship need attention?) I contend that prior to this decade no one generally thought about the status of their relationship.

Later in the decade – the 1990s was fertile ground for word aficionados – the word “infrastructure” weaselled its way into common parlance. All of a sudden everyday people were commenting upon and evaluating the state of the nation’s infrastructure and, what’s more, they were demanding more infrastructure.

And do not get me started on the American pronunciation (let alone spelling) of Australian English. The latest bastion to teeter is lever. Clever lever is wrong. Beaver lever is right.

But then perhaps this is modern life. Language, pronunciation and perhaps even spellings all tell a story of fashion, of influences, of an evolving Australian culture where we’re all seeking to tell our own stories in our own words.