2014 has been a good year for the use of certain words or
combination of them, or indeed their misuse, when weaseling is so out of
control that when the government says one thing it can often mean its opposite.
(For how many times has ‘freedom’ been invoked when cuts are made to services,
or new restrictions are adopted, or ever more powers are given to police and
security organisations?) Curiously, it was
Edward Tylor, the father of anthropology, who discovered in his landmark
comparative study of language that in early languages the same word was often
used for both one thing and its opposite, so maybe we’re just reverting to
form.
It’s been a serious time for Australians. The certainty of the longest boom in the
nation’s history has evaporated, and we’re coming to realise that we missed the
boat on capturing revenue from it. This
has been exacerbated by the actions of a seriously cackhanded government so
anxious to attain office that while it spruiked axing the carbon tax it hadn’t
the guts to axe the benefits that went with it, and its moves to contain a
concocted ‘budget deficit’ threaten to
further contract the economy.
So not many words for laughs this year. ‘Shirtfront’ got a guernsey for word of the
year from the Australian National Dictionary Centre after Abbott played tough guy with Putin but
I don’t even want to go there. So
instead, this list, obviously not exhaustive, or in any significant order, just as the words came to
mind. If you have any comments, or any words to add to it, don't hesitate to let us know. (Come to think of it, I did leave out those two disgraceful descriptors: 'lifters' and 'leaners'!)
Transparency
There have been many calls for transparency this year, maybe
because there’s been so little of it. Proposed
changes to the freedom of information act will do much to weaken it, and
government cuts have already left the Office of the Australian Information
Commissioner, the last port of call for appeal under the act, seriously
underfunded. The bill, if it passes the
senate, will dispense with the office altogether. When and if it goes it will cost $861 to
appeal a refusal for information to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The government as well has been ludicrously secretive
over its Orwellian Operation Sovereign Borders, and tight
restrictions on the flow of information from the PM’s office have been imposed,
not to mention cuts to the ABC. All
this, and moves to limit information pertaining to superannuation, company
registers, food safety and in many other areas sits oddly with Abbott’s strident
call for transparency in relation to a proposed $50 billion Chinese initiative
for an infrastructure bank.
Inequality
Thanks in great part to Thomas Picketty, the French
economist whose book on the subject came out in English earlier this year, any
doubts we’ve been harbouring over the massive con that’s been played on the
public in western democracies over the past three decades were resoundingly
confirmed. It’s now almost impossible to
argue that whatever’s good for the market is good for the nation, yet a mere
two months after the translated Capital
in the 21st Century came out, our government brought down a
budget largely based on that old discredited ‘trickle-down’ philosophy. Studies from the Australia Institute, for
one, have shown that inequality has increased in Australia since the 1980s and
the gap between the rich and poor will grow unless measures are taken now to
narrow it. Instead we’ve got the most
punitive budget remembered, which has targeted the increasingly disadvantaged, including
our young people.
Vast majority
The phrase is used so consistently, in commentary, speeches
and just about every news bulletin on air, that it may as well be written as one
word, or at least a hyphenated one, for there seems to be no other kind of
majority these days other than the monumentally vast kind.
Resilience
Taking over from ‘surviving’ as possibly the quality most
admired in people, the ability to bounce back does seem more hopeful than the
capacity for just grinning, gritting your teeth and bearing it. We heard the word a lot during the year,
particularly in relation to our first woman prime minister, who had it in
spades.
Precarity
This is a word that crept into consciousness during the
global recession and the tenacious job insecurity that’s come with it. It’s particularly apt in describing the
depressing round of unpaid or poorly paid internships introduced in all kinds
of workplaces. Many young people have
had to get by for years on these, seizing the opportunities for augmenting
their resumés until they can manage to bag a real job. But real jobs with decent pay and some degree of
permanency have become rare birds indeed.
In 2012, 25 percent of the jobs available in Australia were casual, and
casualisation and contract labour are predicted to increase.
Flexibility
Once the favoured word for improving conditions for workers,
it’s now code for removing protections for them. We hear it a lot from employer bodies, conservative
think tanks and increasingly and ominously from government.
Forensic
Denoting the evidence gathered for use in a court of law,
‘forensic’ is used widely now to denote any thorough,
painstaking investigation, be it in public affairs or in accounting. (Might this be a reflection of the perennial
popularity of crime fiction?)
Unpack
Another way of saying ‘analysis’, which itself means
breaking down something into its constituent parts to get a grip on its
workings. Purist English-lovers
might approve, however - ‘unpack’ has
the flavour and solidity of the language’s Anglo-Saxon origins, even if all the dictionary can tell us is that it’s
related to Middle Low German.
I love that
A constant on social media, where did this peculiar construction
originate? We used to be content with ‘I
love the way that’ or ‘I love how’ but somehow
this new way of saying it has taken over.
My guess is that it came from teen talk in America. For me, it’s on a par with the curious
‘between you and I’ that’s cropped up, painfully, everywhere.
Remit
Once a brief, now it’s a remit. I don’t know why. Words swerve in and out of fashion. ‘Remit’ has many meanings, largely to do with
money and the law; the same is true of ‘brief’, but first ‘brief’, and now ‘remit’
have settled into primarily indicating any area of authority or responsibility given an individual or group.
Efficiency dividend
A euphemism dragged from the world of business and applied
to public services, it’s one of the latest examples of how business has become
the paradigm for just about everything else in society. What it’s supposed to mean is that less is more,
that cutting creates efficiency. But
efficiency for what, one may ask. A
public service like the ABC, for example, may gain in efficiency but lose a lot
of what makes it valued by so many discerning Australians – the quality and
variety of its programming and the integrity of its reporting. An efficiency dividend for universities means
– well, how do you measure that when
restricted to consulting ‘the bottom line’.
Sustainability
This has been a popular word for decades but its meaning in
past years has been subtly transformed. It
used to apply to ecological concerns, to whether a business or activity
operated in accord with protecting the environment. Now when it’s used – and it’s used almost
daily – it refers to whether a business or activity is sustainable in
financial or fiscal terms.
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