Pusillanimous? Turnbull’s $50 retort is a soundbite for the ages

Welcome to Oz. Say hello to Dorothy and Toto. Meet the scarecrow (with no brain), the heartless tinman and the pusillanimous lion. Of course, Frank L. Baum resisted that last adjective, since cowardly is 10 times clearer. As that’s how “pusillanimous” translates if we break it down: pusillus is Latin for weak – the root of puerile (or childish) – while animus denotes courage or spirit, the source of animal and animate.

Animosity too, the same dislike News Corp nursed for Malcolm Turnbull last week, the former PM accused of jeopardising US trade talks. To recap, Turnbull went on Bloomberg News, depicting Donald Trump as a chaotic bully. That was Monday.

Malcolm Turnbull and Moira SchittCredit: Artwork by Marija Ercegovac

On Tuesday, the remarks reverberating, Trump labelled our ex-PM as “a weak and ineffective leader”. Later that week, Turnbull joined Sally Sara on Radio National, where he was asked about the wisdom of disparaging Trump while the tariff debate hung in the air.

Malcolm bridled. “Has the ABC become so pusillanimous that you’re seriously suggesting that we shouldn’t be free to speak the truth in Australia, for fear of Donald Trump? Is that the depths you’ve sunk to?”

For full disclosure, I work at ABC Radio as Evenings host across Victoria. Yet this is less an ABC story than the ploy behind choosing a fancier term within your vocab’s ABC. Why say pusillanimous when mousy does the trick? Or does it? Roget’s confirms the words are synonyms, in league with timid and fearful, each option bearing its own shading. Had Turnbull chosen gutless, or gun-shy, we’d be having a different discussion.

But he didn’t. The ex-barrister went for the $50 label, picking the intellectual adjective for greater clout. Pusillanimous is not in Trump’s linguistic armoury, or many others’ for that matter. More esoteric than esoteric, the word hit home. In five syllables, Turnbull declared himself as un-Trump, summoning a scholarly era before TikTok gutted the library. But better than that, erudite turned into soundbite.

Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose, always ready with a big word.

Sure, chicken would have clicked with a wider audience, just like Baum’s cowardly lion, but pusillanimous went to bookmark Turnbull’s argument. People searched the term, probably moving onward to the story, the interview, the moral standpoint. TV Tropes, a small-screen forum, knows the syndrome as “sesquipedalian loquaciousness”, or a tendency to throw long words into your chat.

Moira Rose, played by Catherine O’Hara, epitomises the art on the sitcom Schitt’s Creek. A soap star stuck in a Podunk town, Moira deploys her purple vocab to underscore class as much as sass, deploying frippet and pettifogging with deadeye panache. By lamenting her “fading juvenescence”, she’s also reminding us of her power, her lex a charismatic flex.

A year ago, when a ship smacked into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, maritime experts identified the accident as an allision, nautical jargon for striking a fixed object. No coincidence, Merriam-Webster logged allision as among its highest look-ups of 2024. In a sense, the ship and word doubled the event’s impact. As a result, via word and image, people dug deeper into the story, the causes, the matter’s ticklish legality.

Trump might be a bully, but Malcolm Turnbull’s got sesquipedalian loquaciousness on his side.Credit: Bloomberg; Alex Ellinghausen

One year on, HMAS Turnbull has pulled a similar oar, with the letters of allision even hiding in pusillanimous. Cynics will rebuke the ex-PM for his elitist language, yet one fancy turn of speech has alerted Oz – the non-Baum version – to the bigger issue of free speech, whether that includes long words or not.

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