Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Melbourne
It was an ordinary lecture to first-year students on ‘Women Writers and Modernism’. My brief was to introduce the different ways men and women responded to the social, intellectual and artistic challenges of the modernist movement.
This is a subject about the literature of the early 20th century, but it tackles some difficult social questions too. While men were facing the horrors of war, the challenges of industrialisation and the disruption of many familiar intellectual and social hierarchies, women were gaining access to education, greater participation in the democratic process, and fuller employment.
I told the students that several days ago on talkback radio, where the topic was sexual and domestic violence against women, I had heard a caller say that many men felt threatened by women’s increasing participation in the workforce. These were complicated issues, I said, but it did seem that we were still rehearsing arguments that were current over a hundred years ago, and that these patterns of anxiety were part of broader systemic patterns associated with patriarchy and capitalism.
But it was time to turn to my women writers. I began with Hilda Doolittle (renamed ‘H.D.’ by Ezra Pound) and talked about the way many women writers rewrote classical stories from a woman’s perspective. I clicked on to my next slide, part of her poem written in 1916, Eurydice.
I stopped. Silence fell around me, and I could not speak. I tried again, but could not get out a word. I had been in full rhetorical flight in front of several hundred students, but suddenly felt an awful silence spreading, as my students realised first that something was wrong, and then realised why I had stopped.
The elegant and unusual name Eurydice—and the awful death through sexual violence of a young woman, less than a kilometre north of our campus, less than two months ago—was resonating powerfully in the lecture theatre.
Unable to speak, I felt a moment’s panic and shame, fearing the students would think I had staged the whole thing for dramatic effect. For surely I could not be surprised by my own choice of text.
I gathered myself together, reminded the students of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (abducted by Hades into the Underworld and released into Orpheus’s care on condition he not look back until he leads her into the sunlight), and read these lines:
So you have swept me back,
I who could have walked with the live souls
above the earth,
I who could have slept among the live flowers
at last;
so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back
where dead lichens drip
dead cinders upon moss of ash;
so for your arrogance
I am broken at last,
I who had lived unconscious,
who was almost forgot;
if you had let me wait
I had grown from listlessness into peace,
if you had let me rest with the dead,
I had forgot you
and the past.
The students were still and silent as I read. Hearing this voice of a dead woman from the mythical past called up the presence—I think we all felt it—of the young woman whose story we all knew. For those few moments, we held vigil for Eurydice Dixon.
This is what it feels like to be ‘triggered’ by literature, to have a fictional incident or even a name suddenly ambush you from your train of thought, your narrative curiosity and your readerly pleasure. Literature can take your breath away, even when the trauma it recalls is a communal one, not a personal tragedy.
And yet I only half-heartedly, and only occasionally, give ‘trigger warnings’ advising students that they may encounter violence and trauma of various kinds in literary texts. The best argument for such warnings is not that students can then refuse to read, but that students suffering post-traumatic stress may prepare themselves for the confronting business of discussing literary texts in classes: the emotional engagement with others in a public setting.
Such warnings testify to the very real power of literary texts to challenge and confront us, often in ways we cannot anticipate.
But this incident also reveals the impossibility of such warnings. There was no way I could have known I would be taken so deeply by surprise at my own response; no way I would ever have warned students that a poem about a mythical abduction to the Underworld might trigger this awful feeling.
Literature works in mysterious and unpredictable ways. This episode reminds us of its astonishing capacity to strike emotional chords and resonances. Such moments can make us feel awful and uncomfortable, and can disrupt our carefully managed public and professional performances of the self, but they can also generate strong emotional connections between people, across time and different cultures. Of course I can’t be sure what all the students were thinking, though an unusual number of them came up to me afterwards and thanked me for the lecture.
Moreover, if literature produces this sting, it also produces the cure. Seeing H.D.’s beautiful poem on my screen gave me the courage to go on and to do justice to her work. The poem gave me the words to say next. Reading that poem—finding structure and pattern in its cadences, and finding a voice in its lyrical core—produced poetic order out of emotional chaos.
Article first published August 9, 2018.
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne
In one foul-mouthed phrase, Senator David Leyonhjelm has turned a debate about the safety of women into a sleazy political sideshow.
Claiming—without a shred of factual support—that he had interpreted Senator Sarah Hanson-Young as having said words to the effect of ‘all men are rapists’, Leyonhjelm called across the chamber that she should ‘stop shagging men’. Confronted by her afterwards, he told her to ‘fuck off’.
It is one more example of the debasement of political debate in Australia, aided and abetted by elements of the media, in this case Sky News. Its ‘Outsiders’ panel of Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron gave Leyonhjelm a platform on which he repeated his offensive remarks, and sat back obligingly while he did so.
Only when the network was deluged with complaints did Cameron apologise for the pair of them, and the network took its own action—suspending not Dean and Cameron but the nameless and faceless young female producer who put up a caption at the foot of the screen bearing Leyonhjelm’s words.
Sexism and sexual innuendo are nothing new in politics. Cheryl Kernot, one-time leader of the Australian Democrats who had an affair with Labor’s foreign affairs minister, Gareth Evans, and defected to Labor in the late 1990s, was the butt of some crude slanging on the floor of the parliament.
But since June 24, 2010, when Julia Gillard deposed Kevin Rudd as Labor Prime Minister, these phenomena seem to have got palpably worse.
The reasons are necessarily speculative, but a series of developments over the intervening eight years might help to explain it.
One has been the explosive arrival of social media and its adoption as a tool of propaganda by all who want to make themselves heard, regardless of taste, harm or substance. Facebook, launched in 2004, went global in 2006, the same year that Twitter was launched. YouTube appeared in 2005, Instagram in 2010 (acquired by Facebook in 2012) and Snapchat in 2011.
Whatever benefits they have brought—and there are many—they have also brought trolling.
During Gillard’s prime ministership, a vast amount of trolling was directed at her. It was gross in its extremism and vulgarity. Much of it was crude pornography. There was incitement to violence and unbridled misogyny.
Research by Anne Summers, for her 2012 Human Rights and Social Justice Lecture at the University of Newcastle, revealed just how vile this online assault became. The poison seeped out into the wider public discourse, where inevitably elements of the mainstream media magnified it.
Notable contributors to this were commercial radio talkback shock jocks Alan Jones, Ray Hadley and Chris Smith. Their depictions of, and remarks about, Gillard were disgustingly offensive. Not only were they sexist, extremist and malicious, but in Jones’s case involved encouragement of the idea that the prime minister should be dumped at sea.
And then, of course, there was the infamous question about the sexual orientation of the prime minister’s partner.
Portrayals of Gillard by other elements of the mainstream media, especially the newspapers, were generally less grotesque, but raised important ethical issues just the same.
The most common, and in some ways the most difficult to pin down, concerned the passively neutral way in which they covered the grossly disrespectful public attacks on her, just as Dean and Cameron did on Sunday to Hanson-Young.
An egregious example was the coverage of the rally outside Parliament House in 2011 when the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, gave legitimacy to sentiments such as ‘ditch the witch’ and ‘bitch’ by allowing himself to be photographed in front of placards bearing those words.
A more recent development, also made possible by the internet, has been the rise of the #metoo movement. Women who previously felt powerless to speak out about sexual harassment are now doing so, bringing down some powerful men such as Harvey Weinstein in the process.
This has produced a backlash consisting of a complicated mix of male dubiety about the exact nature of sexual harassment and irritation by some feminists at what they see as an apparent weakening of women’s agency.
The fact there is a backlash at all doubtless encourages those who wish to say that attention to sexual harassment is overdone and we should get back to a bit of good old-fashioned slagging of the kind epitomised by Leyonhjelm’s remarks.
A further factor might be that the boundaries of privacy have shifted. Sexual references that would have been deemed off-limits a decade ago are now shared on social media. Perhaps this is having a desensitising effect on standards of public taste.
Trends in public standards influence editorial decision-making. Stories are published that previously might not have been, or might have been toned down.
As professional mass media try to keep pace with developments in social media, editors might feel they will be left behind if they don’t swiftly adapt to these changing mores and become more libertarian in their decision-making.
In these ways, boundaries in public taste and decency shift over time. However, Leyonhjelm has clearly put himself beyond the pale. Sky News obviously recognised this and felt an apology was necessary, even if Leyonhjelm himself does not.
Meanwhile, it is sobering to reflect on the worst consequences of disrespectful attitudes to women. The shocking rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon in Melbourne last month—which gave rise to the debate in which Leyonhjelm made his disgraceful interjection—has rightly led to an outpouring of community outrage and grief.
The 2018 report of the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network, which draws on data from all the coroners’ courts in Australia, stated that between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2014 there were 152 intimate partner homicides across Australia that followed an identifiable history of domestic violence.
Of these, 121, or 79.6%, were women killed by men.
Article first published July 4, 2018.
Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University
Senior Fellow, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and Professor of Linguistics, Monash University
Australian English decidedly finds its origins in British English. But when it comes to chasing down Irish influence, there are—to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—some knowun knowuns, some unknowun knowuns, and a bucketload of furphies.
The first Irish settlers, around half of whom were reputedly Irish language speakers, were viewed with suspicion and derision. This is reflected in the early Australian English words used to describe those who came from Patland (a blend of Paddy and Land).
The Irish were guided by paddy’s lantern (the moon); their homes adorned with Irish curtains (cobwebs); and their hotheadedness saw them have a paddy or paddy out. These Irish were said to follow Rafferty’s Rules—an eponym from the surname Rafferty—which meant ‘no rules at all’.
More than a few Irish were larrikins. In his book Austral English, E.E. Morris reports that in 1869 an Irish sergeant Dalton charged a young prisoner with ‘a-larrr-akin about the streets’ (an Irish pronunciation of larking, or ‘getting up to mischief’). When asked to repeat by the magistrate, Dalton said: ‘a larrikin, your Worchup’.
This Irish origin of larrikin had legs for many years, and perhaps still does. Unfortunately, here we have our first furphy, with more compelling evidence linking larrikin to a British dialect word meaning ‘mischievous or frolicsome youth’.
But if larrikin language is anything to go by, these youths went way beyond mischievous frolicking—jump someone’s liver out, put the boot in, stonker, rip into, go the knuckle on and weigh into are just some items from the larrikin’s lexicon of fighting words.
With the Dalton furphy, though, we see evidence of something called ‘epenthesis’, the insertion of extra sounds. Just as Dalton adds a vowel after his trilled ‘r’ in a-larrr-akin, many Aussies add a vowel to words like ‘known’ and ‘film’ (knowun and filum)—and here we see a potential influence of the Irish accent on Australian English.
In contrast to larrikin, the word sheila is incontrovertibly Irish. Popular belief derives it from the proper name, Sheila, used as the female counterpart to Paddy, a general reference to Irish males.
Author Dymphna Lonergan, in her book Sounds Irish, prefers to derive it from Irish Gaelic síle, meaning ‘homosexual’, noting Sheila wasn’t a particularly popular Irish name as it began to appear down under.
Significantly though, St Patrick had a wife (or mother) named Sheila, and the day after St Paddy’s Day was once celebrated as Sheelah’s Day. So, Sheila was something of a celebrity.
Barrack is another likely Irish-inspired expression. A range of competing origins have been posited for this one, including the Aboriginal Wathawarung word borak, meaning ‘no, not’, and links to the Victorian military barracks in Melbourne.
But the most likely origin is the Northern Irish English barrack, ‘to brag, be boastful of one’s fighting powers’. The word has since sprouted opposite uses—Australian barrackers shout noisy support for somebody, while British barrackers shout in criticism or protest.
Perhaps surprisingly to many, the Irish were the first Europeans some Australian Aboriginal tribes encountered.
This contact is evident in the presence of Irish words in some Aboriginal languages. For instance, in the Ngiyampaa language of New South Wales, the word for shoe is pampuu, likely linked to a kind of shoe associated with the Aran Islands in Ireland, pampúta.
Lonergan argues that more attention should be directed to this sort of Irish-Gaelic influence. Lonergan points, for example, to archival evidence linking the origin of didgeridoo to an outsider’s perception of how the instrument sounds, while questioning the degree to which the sound corresponds to the word.
As a counterargument, she notes an Irish word dúdaire, meaning ‘trumpeter or horn-blower’, as well as Irish and Scots-Gaelic dubh, ‘black’, and dúth, ‘native’. She observes that Irish and Scots-Gaelic speakers first encountering the instrument might well have called it dúdaire dubh or dúdaire dúth (pronounced respectively ‘doodereh doo’ or ‘doojerreh doo’).
Similar arguments are made for a number of other words traditionally viewed as having British English origins.
The Australian National Dictionary sees chook (also spelled chuck) as linked to a Northern English-Scottish variation of ‘chick’. However, Lonergan notes this is phonetically the same word (spelled tioc) the Irish would have used when calling chickens to feed (tioc, tioc, tioc).
Another potential influence also comes from the transference of Irish meaning to English words. For example, The Australian National Dictionary is unclear as to the exact origin of shout, ‘to buy a round of drinks’, but Lonergan links it to Irish working in the goldfields and an Irish phrase glaoch ar dheoch, ‘to call or shout for a drink’.
Lonergan posits that Irish miners translating to English might have selected ‘shout’ rather than ‘call’—’shouting’ could easily have spread to English speakers as a useful way to get a drink in a noisy goldfields bar.
Irish influence on Australian English is much like the influence of the Irish on Australians themselves—less than you’d expect on the surface, but everywhere once you start looking.
And those with a soft spot for Irish English might feel better knowing that some of their bête noires are in fact Irish (haitch, youse, but, filum and knowun).
As Irish settlers entered the Australian melting pot, so too did a hearty dose of their language.
Article first published March 15, 2018.
Associate Professor in Writing, The University of Queensland
American film director Judd Apatow once confessed to TV host Stephen Colbert that he’d been mispronouncing his wife Leslie Mann’s name for nearly two decades. He’d been saying ‘Lez-lee’, while she pronounces it as ‘Less-lee’. When he asked her why she hadn’t corrected his mistake, she said she ‘thought he wouldn’t be able to make the adjustment’. Barbra Streisand, unlike Mann, is reportedly insistent that her name be pronounced correctly by everyone, even Apple’s voice assistant Siri.
In Australia, mispronunciation is often said as ‘mispronounciation’. Although it is a noun, there’s no ‘noun’ in it. In 1987, Harold Scruby, who later functioned as deputy mayor of the Mosman City Council, published a quirky compendium of instances of mispronunciation by Australians. He labelled these ‘Waynespeak’. Prior to the publication of Scruby’s book, his friend Leo Schofield had run some of the expressions in his Sydney Morning Herald column and been drowned in ‘a Niagara of correspondence’.
Hordes of respondents regarded these expressions to be at least non-standard, or just plain wrong. Despite this, many of Scruby’s examples remain current today: ‘anythink’ and its companions ‘everythink’, ‘nothink’ and ‘somethink’; ‘arks’ (‘ask’); ‘astericks’ (‘asterisk’); ‘bought’ (‘brought’); ‘could of’ (‘could’ve’); ‘deteriate’ (‘deteriorate’); ‘ecksetra’ (‘et cetera’); ‘expresso’ (‘espresso’); ‘haitch’ (‘aitch’); ‘hone in’ (‘home in’); and so on through to the end of the alphabet with ‘youse’.
For those of us who wince when we hear ‘youse’, it might be a surprise to find the term in a dictionary. The Macquarie Dictionary feels compelled to explain that the dictionary is a complete record of Australian English. The criterion for inclusion is thus ‘evidence of currency in the language community’.
When I polled friends for their pet pronunciation peeves, many of them listed those in the Waynespeak collection. Others added examples that readers may cringe at: ‘cachay’ (‘cache’) and ‘orientate’ (‘orient’).
A favourite was ‘Moët’—often pronounced as ‘Mo-eee’ or ‘Mo-way’. The name is of Dutch origin and is correctly pronounced as ‘Mo-wett’.
My pet pronunciation peeve is the mispronunciation of the word ‘the’ in front of a word beginning with a vowel. Many people, and just about all newsreaders, pronounce it as a neutral ‘thuh’ instead of sounding it out as ‘thee’, as in ‘tea’. It’s thee apple, not thuh apple.
Some of the suggestions that surfaced in my poll classify as a ‘malapropism’ rather than as a mispronunciation. The term malapropism derives from the name of a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy of manners, The Rivals. Mrs Malaprop’s bungled attempts at erudite speech led her to declare one gentleman ‘the very pineapple of politeness!’ and to say of another, ‘illiterate him … from your memory’.
Writers of television scripts often create characters prone to malapropisms: Irene in Home and Away, Virginia Chance in Raising Hope, and Tony Soprano in The Sopranos. The Australian television characters Kath and Kim were notorious for their malapropisms, such as ‘I want to be effluent and practise serial monotony’.
As Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott once embarrassingly substituted ‘suppository’ for ‘repository’. In an article about the proposed airport at Badgerys Creek in Sydney, a reporter mentioned ‘a relatively modest and small group that would have some affectation’. Did the reporter mean ‘effect’?
The San Remo Hotel in San Francisco, meanwhile, highlights its ‘turn of the century decorum’. On the UK television show The Apprentice, one of the contestants talked about ‘appealing to the female genre’.
Other examples that I have noted include: ‘What are you incinerating about me?’; ‘a Dorian of the theatre’; ‘a logo that amplifies modernism and professionalism’; ‘It’s not as if the English language is frozen in aspen’ (though it’s pretty cold in Aspen); and ‘As we approach the footy finals, I can emphasise with the players’.
Justin Bieber once said: ‘I was detrimental to my own career’. I think we can guess that Justin meant ‘instrumental’, though he may have been just self-aware. We can also guess what the other malapropisms should have been (decor, gender, insinuating, doyen, exemplifies, aspic, empathise).
Note that there needs to be a tinge of humour for an expression or word to be labelled as a malapropism, and it needs to be a real word. Richard Lederer has a hugely amusing post on malapropisms on his Verbivore site, including this fine example: ‘If you wish to submit a recipe for publication in the cookbook, please include a short antidote concerning it.’
An extension of malapropism occurs in the malamanteau, which is a word that The Economist defines as an erroneous and unintentional portmanteau.
It was launched as a word on the xkcd comic strip and is apparently unpopular with the Wikipedia administration folks, who objected to the word having an entry on the site. The most quoted malamanteau is George W. Bush’s ‘I misunderestimated’. Others that have evoked smirks have been ‘miscommunicado’ (from ‘miscommunicate’ and ‘incommunicado’), ‘insinuendo’ (from ‘innuendo’ and ‘insinuation’), and ‘squirmish’ (‘squirm’ and ‘skirmish’).
I recently heard a sparkling new malamanteau, ‘merticular’, used to describe a fussy person. It appears to combine ‘particular’ and ‘meticulous’. When I questioned this and suggested that ‘meticulous’ would do, the speaker said: ‘No. A merticular person functions at a higher level of “pickyness” than a “particular” person.’
It’s over to you now: Are you merely ‘picky’ or are you ‘merticular’?
Is it worthy of the moniker of malamanteau? If so, how would you spell it?
Article first published December 5, 2017.
Postdoctoral Researcher in Morality and Social Psychology, The University of Queensland
Footage of 12 boys trapped in a cave system in Thailand has inundated our screens in recent days.
An international rescue effort is under way, which includes a team of specialists sent by the Australian government to assist with the safe recovery of the young soccer team. Highlighting the gravity of the situation, a former Thai Navy diver has died after running out of oxygen during rescue efforts.
This is without doubt a frightening situation for the boys and their families. It’s no surprise the situation has received global media attention. It does raise some interesting questions, though, about how we extend empathy and concern to people we don’t know.
Why does this tragedy capture the world’s attention, when more long-term issues such as children in detention don’t to the same extent? Research from moral psychology can help us to understand this.
A key reason is simply that we can see the Thai soccer team. We’re watching the rescue effort play out and we can see the emotions of the boys and their families.
We have seen this kind of viral, blanket coverage of tragic incidents recently. One example is the horrific scenes of children fighting for their lives after the 2017 chemical weapon attacks in Syria. Another is the striking image that emerged in June of a small Honduran girl crying as officials detain her mother at the US–Mexico border.
By contrast, issues that are arguably no less frightening don’t always generate the same outpouring of concern and sympathy. An example is the more than 200 children held in detention on Nauru and throughout the Australian mainland.
This isn’t to suggest the Australian government shouldn’t aid in international rescue efforts, but we should be equally concerned about the far greater number of children being held indefinitely in Australian detention.
The fact is we have very little access to images of children in detention, as media access to Manus Island and Nauru is heavily restricted. Journalists face substantial obstacles if they want to visit our offshore detention centres, and in 2016 the Australian government threatened healthcare workers with jail time if they spoke about the conditions they encountered on Nauru and Manus.
We simply aren’t permitted to view the plight of child refugees, and we’re much less likely to experience an empathic response if we can’t see them.
The recent outcry caused by the dramatic footage aboard an Australian live export ship illustrates this perfectly. Most of us would be aware to some extent that live export is a cruel practice. But it isn’t until the footage forces us to confront the realities that we create enough momentum to discuss meaningful change.
The perspective we take also makes a huge difference. If we can easily draw comparisons between ourselves and those in need we’re more likely to extend concern and empathy.
Given Australia’s geography and climate, it’s not too difficult for us to imagine our children caught up in a natural disaster. It’s much more difficult for us to imagine our children fleeing their homeland and seeking asylum in a foreign country.
And it’s far easier to extend sympathy to a situation that, one way or another, will reach an end.
Ongoing humanitarian issues such as asylum seekers or food shortages on the African continent feel like immense challenges often placed in the too hard basket. Therefore these issues fade away in the face of what we consider more pressing matters with more straightforward resolutions.
The labels we attach are also crucial in determining our response.
For example, in 2016, former prime minister Tony Abbott referred to asylum seekers as an invading force. This sort of language is incredibly damaging, because when trying to make sense of a moral injustice we immediately look to identify both a victim and a villain. Suffering without a villain doesn’t always make sense to us—though the villains we choose are often subjective.
There is some fascinating research demonstrating this. For example, throughout the US, belief in God is highest in states where citizens experience the greatest amount of suffering—infant mortality, cancer deaths, natural disasters. This relationship holds after controlling for a range of alternative explanations, such as income and education. God is perceived to be the ‘villain’ responsible for all this senseless suffering.
It’s impossible to label those suffering at the hands of a chemical attack as anything but victims. However, if we perceive asylum seekers as wrongdoers trying to steal some sort of unfair advantage, we’re far less likely to think of them as victims requiring our compassion. This means it’s far easier to cast them out of our moral circle.
Of course we should have sympathy for the soccer team trapped in the cave. But, no matter the outcome, the story will disappear from our screens as the next pressing crisis arises.
We should ensure the reality of longer-term problems doesn’t also disappear, having fallen victim to the failings of our moral cognition.
Article first published July 9, 2018.