Fred Ludowyk

This is a book about words that are on their way to the dictionary cemetery where they will be stamped with the labels ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’. Of course, unlike us, these dying words will achieve a kind of eternity through being permanently displayed in dictionaries, but the time will come when no living person possesses them as part of their actual speech. Ruth Wajnryb proposes that a hospice should be set up to provide sanctuary and comfort for these weary and largely forgotten lexical bits and pieces, a ‘hospice of fading words’.

This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.

David Crystal has written numerous books on language – ‘over 100’ proclaims the cover blurb. In the chapter titled ‘Wordbirths’, Crystal muses on how rare it is to know who created a new word. In this regard, at the Australian National Dictionary Centre we have been tracing the term barbecue stopper, which is first recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 2001: ‘That’s one reason he [John Howard] will talk about improving the balance between work and family, a topic he describes as a “barbecue stopper” because it engenders so much conversation whenever people get together.’ Did the prime minister invent the term, or was it the creation of his speechwriter?

Books on language have been immensely popular in recent years. Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1999) was a study of the relationship between James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the insane citation collector Dr Minor. Winchester followed this with The Meaning of Everything (2003), a history of the Oxford English Dictionary project. In Australia, the reception of Don Watson’s Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (2003) and of Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words (2004) demonstrated the general reading public’s interest in language matters.