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Foreword to the Fourth Edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, 2005
I remember the joy and outright enthusiasm with which the Macquarie Dictionary was greeted when it first appeared in 1981. Here was a dictionary of English as it was used on this great, eccentric continent, a continent located at a huge distance from the Northern European sources of the language. Because we were just starting to congratulate ourselves, perhaps a little too loudly, on our escape from post-colonial cultural ignominy, we tended to see the emergence of the dictionary as a great nationalist monument, a visible sign of our maturity as a society, a validation of the normal coinage of Australian idiom. It bespoke the particular people that Australia, so drastically alien in so many aspects from the environments where English had its birth, had made us. In our view then, it defined and validated the English we spoke at home and work and school, and to have that language defined and taken seriously was something we just weren’t used to. I remember the novelty of looking up the word mullygrubber, and there it was, and so was skite, a common insult employed by my generation of schoolchildren. I, and many others, relished the novelty of seeing such words in august print. The Macquarie paid the antipodean tongue the great compliment of taking it seriously.
Rightly or wrongly, we saw it too as a bastion for the preservation of our quirky and often earthy usages, and we were still twitchy enough to be grateful for that. All this quite apart from the humbler but most significant fact that the Macquarie served as a tool, by becoming the most apposite guide to usage and spelling for people living here.
So, if the first edition of the Macquarie took within its ample covers all the language heritage and usage we Australians wanted, why do we need a fourth edition? Is it a matter of marketing, or necessity?
It’s plainly a case of necessity. For the truth is that the Macquarie was designed not only to explain Australian idiom to the world, but also explain what could be called World English to Australians, and equip them to use it. The Macquarie is only in part a dictionary of words bred in isolation from the world. To be more than an act of nostalgia it must be the great lexicon of words used by Australians in the world, in communicating with the world of science, politics and culture. And since all these areas of human striving have exploded into new manifestations of language at a rate that would spin the head of a mid-twentieth century lexicographer, we need all of the chief usages mediated to us by a new edition. Without it, we have less chance of being informed citizens of the world in this new, lumps-and-all century.
An eloquent example is the word archaeon, making its first appearance in this new edition. An archaeon is a microscopic organism which can survive without light from the sun and at boiling temperatures in the earth’s depths or around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea. The existence of such creatures on earth, opening up entirely new and urgent possibilities for biological research, and suggesting the likelihood of life in space, had barely been postulated, the word barely coined, when the Macquarie first appeared.
Even recently, the scientific implications of archaeons had not been seen as important enough for the word to make it into the third edition of the Macquarie.
Another new technological word, biomimetics, the system of engineering which looks to living creatures to provide structural models, similarly achieves its first cap in this new edition. Biomimetics might not carry the imaginative lustre and directness of such earlier technological words as stump-jump plough, but it may figure hugely in our twenty-first century lives. As Donald Horne said in his introduction to the second edition, ‘A dictionary is not a museum of old, departed meanings … It must tell us what words mean now, whether we like it or not.’
As for other new terms, such as apoptosis, cord blood, chronotherapy, chroming, cyberbludging, digerati, digital signature, doula, gaydar, geocaching, magnetar, nosebleed seat, phage therapy, people smuggling, probiotic, smart clothes, tribute band, WAV, wetware, zorb, I leave them for your own investigation, knowing that to wander amongst words is one of the abiding and traditional joys of using a dictionary.
But I do so with a warning. Some of the words and terms necessarily recorded here are what some commentators might call weasel words – words used to anaesthetise or minimise any sense of corporate or communal alarm, or culpability for the inequities and cruelties of the earth, and in an attempt to sanitise reality. The term itself, weasel word, has already made an appearance in an earlier edition of the Macquarie, and is of course an inexact term, but new appearances of this kind of language in this edition include, at least in the opinion of this writer, bunker buster, carpet bombing, ambient advertising, digital divided, genetic pollution, lifestyle drug, smart gun, Third Way, water banking, harm minimisation, magic bullet, person of interest, stun grenade, surveil, target audience. These are perhaps above all the terms we must get a grasp of and see through, if we are to remain effective and discriminating citizens.
Through Macquarie’s reading program, its corpus (Ozcorp), and through various consultant specialists, illustration of the meanings of terms from such published sources as novels and newspapers is a method much more widely used in this new dictionary than it was in the third edition. Macquarie and the ABC have already cooperated to produce Australian Word Map, an interactive website which identifies regionalisms in Australian English, and many of these regionalisms are also found here. The dictionary has also sensibly recognised that phrases are themselves unitary items of language currency, and so explains idioms like ‘the life of Riley’ and ‘picking the eyes out of something’ both in terms of meaning and origin.
Rightly or wrongly, we saw it too as a bastion for the preservation of our quirky and often earthy usages, and we were still twitchy enough to be grateful for that. All this quite apart from the humbler but most significant fact that the Macquarie served as a tool, by becoming the most apposite guide to usage and spelling for people living here.
So, if the first edition of the Macquarie took within its ample covers all the language heritage and usage we Australians wanted, why do we need a fourth edition? Is it a matter of marketing, or necessity?
It’s plainly a case of necessity. For the truth is that the Macquarie was designed not only to explain Australian idiom to the world, but also explain what could be called World English to Australians, and equip them to use it. The Macquarie is only in part a dictionary of words bred in isolation from the world. To be more than an act of nostalgia it must be the great lexicon of words used by Australians in the world, in communicating with the world of science, politics and culture. And since all these areas of human striving have exploded into new manifestations of language at a rate that would spin the head of a mid-twentieth century lexicographer, we need all of the chief usages mediated to us by a new edition. Without it, we have less chance of being informed citizens of the world in this new, lumps-and-all century.
An eloquent example is the word archaeon, making its first appearance in this new edition. An archaeon is a microscopic organism which can survive without light from the sun and at boiling temperatures in the earth’s depths or around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea. The existence of such creatures on earth, opening up entirely new and urgent possibilities for biological research, and suggesting the likelihood of life in space, had barely been postulated, the word barely coined, when the Macquarie first appeared.
Even recently, the scientific implications of archaeons had not been seen as important enough for the word to make it into the third edition of the Macquarie.
Another new technological word, biomimetics, the system of engineering which looks to living creatures to provide structural models, similarly achieves its first cap in this new edition. Biomimetics might not carry the imaginative lustre and directness of such earlier technological words as stump-jump plough, but it may figure hugely in our twenty-first century lives. As Donald Horne said in his introduction to the second edition, ‘A dictionary is not a museum of old, departed meanings … It must tell us what words mean now, whether we like it or not.’
As for other new terms, such as apoptosis, cord blood, chronotherapy, chroming, cyberbludging, digerati, digital signature, doula, gaydar, geocaching, magnetar, nosebleed seat, phage therapy, people smuggling, probiotic, smart clothes, tribute band, WAV, wetware, zorb, I leave them for your own investigation, knowing that to wander amongst words is one of the abiding and traditional joys of using a dictionary.
But I do so with a warning. Some of the words and terms necessarily recorded here are what some commentators might call weasel words – words used to anaesthetise or minimise any sense of corporate or communal alarm, or culpability for the inequities and cruelties of the earth, and in an attempt to sanitise reality. The term itself, weasel word, has already made an appearance in an earlier edition of the Macquarie, and is of course an inexact term, but new appearances of this kind of language in this edition include, at least in the opinion of this writer, bunker buster, carpet bombing, ambient advertising, digital divided, genetic pollution, lifestyle drug, smart gun, Third Way, water banking, harm minimisation, magic bullet, person of interest, stun grenade, surveil, target audience. These are perhaps above all the terms we must get a grasp of and see through, if we are to remain effective and discriminating citizens.
Through Macquarie’s reading program, its corpus (Ozcorp), and through various consultant specialists, illustration of the meanings of terms from such published sources as novels and newspapers is a method much more widely used in this new dictionary than it was in the third edition. Macquarie and the ABC have already cooperated to produce Australian Word Map, an interactive website which identifies regionalisms in Australian English, and many of these regionalisms are also found here. The dictionary has also sensibly recognised that phrases are themselves unitary items of language currency, and so explains idioms like ‘the life of Riley’ and ‘picking the eyes out of something’ both in terms of meaning and origin.
Those who possess this edition will possess the fullest record to date of English as used by Australians in their unique location on earth, and in their increasingly complicated discourse with the world.