# data[].attributes.body
Some nice examples of code switching and further evidence of how diverse ethnocultural and other group identities are - nice to add to your examples bank if you need!

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the Indigenous affairs team’s Carly Williams, Stephanie Boltje and Tahnee Jash

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‘We’ve put down our spears, we’re using our voice’: Mob react to Lidia Thorpe

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The fallout from Lidia Thorpe’s message to the king has made global headlines. But what do Indigenous Australians make of the interaction? From ‘Not really accurate’ to ‘very ballsy’ First Nations people weight in.

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Some good analysis on political language use

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Some good analysis on political language use

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‘Why are you talking like that?’: How politicians use words to influence and mislead

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Have you ever found yourself agreeing with a politician for no apparent reason? Have you ever thought why many people support a certain politician even though

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Some nice humour for positive politeness

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Some nice humour for positive politeness

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Here's a snippet, but check out thr whole segment:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBGer0XyVdL/?igsh=MWgxaXVtNWx0Ynh0cQ==

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Shrinkflation is being cracked down upon

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Shrinkflation is being cracked down upon

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Some formal sounding economic jargon, but what does it mean and how is it used in contemporary Australia?https://www.pm.gov.au/media/cracking-down-shrinkflation-help-australians-save-time-and-money

https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/packaging-labelling-and-advertising/packaging/articles/shrinkflation-investigation

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Cracking down on shrinkflation to help Australians save time and money

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The Albanese Government is taking action to fight shrinkflation in our supermarkets and retail sector by strengthening the Unit Pricing Code to make it easier for Australians to make accurate and timely price comparisons.The Government will also introduce substantial penalties for supermarkets who do the wrong thing and breach the Unit Pricing Code.The practice of ‘shrinkflation’ is becoming increasingly common, where the size of a product is reduced, but the price at the supermarket is the same or even increases, taking advantage of Australians doing their groceries.

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How might context shape this attitude? Or is it about purpose and intent?

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Contemporary example of the euphemism "in due course" 

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Contemporary example of the euphemism "in due course" 

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Peter Dutton refuses to divulge costs of going nuclear at anticipated ‘could it work’ speech

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Coalition’s lack of costings and absence of detail has been seized upon by critics of Australia’s potential landmark energy shift

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https://theconversation.com/parents-say-good-girl-and-good-boy-all-the-time-heres-why-you-should-try-and-say-something-else-238893

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Although Perry is not Australian, how does she try to demonstrate her Australian audience and her own identity in this tweet? 

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Although Perry is not Australian, how does she try to demonstrate her Australian audience and her own identity in this tweet? 

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Example of Australian humour in advertising

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Example of Australian humour in advertising

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‘Welcome to Sydney’: Tourists do double take in Melbourne

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New signs at airports across the country are having travellers do a double take.

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Can a community own a word? Troye Sivan has views about [twink]

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Can a community own a word? Troye Sivan has views about [twink]

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https://www.gaytimes.com/culture/straight-people-are-getting-too-comfortable-troye-sivan-claps-back-at-grindr-blind-item/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3HhX7e3c6HpdJ_yuu-JXu0uRYWWwmQrg2BHduWDlYmxbYSJAzpDXB2ah0_aem_iEeM49Zv7ApMC5ngN0QuOQ

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“Straight people are getting too comfortable”: Troye Sivan claps back at Grindr blind item

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Grammy-nominated singer Troye Sivan has set the record straight regarding an outlandish Grindr-based blind item.

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Something for the Bridgerton interest group

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Something for the Bridgerton interest group

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Marking identity through the caption! Posted yesterday on facebook

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Acceptable or unacceptable? Older generation using teen slang

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Acceptable or unacceptable? Older generation using teen slang

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https://www.facebook.com/share/r/56Nw7WtGXRERahKu/?mibextid=D5vuiz

Is this about belonging? Or marking not belonging/belonging to a different group? Does it utilise what could be covertly prestigious to mock? Subvert?

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895K views · 30K reactions | Serving curatorial realness fr.
#museum #history #royalarmouries #genz #armsandarmour | By Royal Armouries | Facebook

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Serving curatorial realness fr.
#museum #history #royalarmouries #genz #armsandarmour

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An example of a negative reaction to adults using teenspeak

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An example of a negative reaction to adults using teenspeak

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I don't think older people should copy younger people's modes of speech. It's cheugy. https://t.co/tfzgPMJnvY

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I don't think older people should copy younger people's modes of speech. It's cheugy. https://t.co/tfzgPMJnvY

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"The member for Fairfax should be more mindful and more demure," Chris Bowen tells Parliament. The meme is officially dead.

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I don't think older people should copy younger people's modes of speech. It's cheugy. https://t.co/tfzgPMJnvY
— John Nicholls (@JohnNicholls6PR) September 10, 2024

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I don't think older people should copy younger people's modes of speech. It's cheugy. https://t.co/tfzgPMJnvY

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"The member for Fairfax should be more mindful and more demure," Chris Bowen tells Parliament. The meme is officially dead.

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I don't think older people should copy younger people's modes of speech. It's cheugy. https://t.co/tfzgPMJnvY

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I don't think older people should copy younger people's modes of speech. It's cheugy. https://t.co/tfzgPMJnvY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
"The member for Fairfax should be more mindful and more demure," Chris Bowen tells Parliament. The meme is officially dead.

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Example of teenspeak used by millennials

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Example of teenspeak used by millennials

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‘Brat, slay, ick’: zoo marketing blurb written by gen Z staff goes viral

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Millions have viewed TikTok video starring deadpan Northumberland zoo directors and animals with ‘main character energy’

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_uqiGAyNun/?igsh=MTdwOHk4ZzNxdWxyaw==

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Hokball and other AFL slang examples - what else have you got in your repertoire?

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Hokball and other AFL slang examples - what else have you got in your repertoire?

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There is even a shop dedicated to it:

https://hokball.com/

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Call it Hokball, call them the Showtime Hawks, the Rascal pack or whatever you want ... it's working and taking the AFL by storm.

Sam Mitchell's side has come from the clouds in 2024, to not just sneak into the top eight (even if it did), but charge into finals as one of the form teams of the competition as a premiership smoky.

Not many could've seen it coming, particularly after the club's 0-5 start to the season where the Hawks appeared set for some tough times ahead. But suddenly this budding and brash side won't fear anyone this September ahead of a crunch elimination final showdown with the Western Bulldogs.
Watch the best coverage of the 2024 AFL finals, with expert analysis and every game until the Grand Final LIVE with no ad-breaks during play, on Kayo. New to Kayo? Start your free trial today >

More broadly, the Hawks have redefined the AFL rebuild with the way they've surged back into relevance without spending a prolonged period of pain at the bottom of the ladder.

So how did they get here so quickly? Well, Sam Mitchell has been plotting the style he wanted his side to play for several years by planning well into the future.

"If we try and play the way Melbourne and Geelong are playing, they're going to be better than us at that. So we need to figure out the what next generation of the game is then play that way," Mitchell said on the Backchat Podcast in 2022.

"So in three years' time when everyone is trying to play this new style, we've already been playing it and learned all the mistakes."

It's one of many reasons why these Hawks have risen so rapidly to become one of the AFL's hottest sides.
BOLD CALLS
You really have to go back to midway through 2021 when Collingwood's approach to Mitchell forced Hawthorn's hand to orchestrate a coaching succession plan.

It saw Mitchell take the coaching reins from four-time premiership boss Alastair Clarkson a year earlier than planned from 2022 in a messy handover that was widely criticised at the time.

Of course, there'd been evidence of previous failures with coaching succession plans and favourite sons in general getting the keys of clubs.

If that didn't already shake things up enough, the Hawks after an eight-win season in Mitchell's first in charge sensationally traded away veteran midfield duo Tom Mitchell and Jaeger O'Meara.

It was part of an aggressive rebuild strategy in a bid to accelerate the club's overall progress, having traded out several draft picks in the years after the 2015 premiership, with an eye on eventually getting back to flag contention - not just finals.

That strategy is looking pretty damn good now, with Hawthorn arguably placed better than any side long term despite never dropping lower than 16th during its rebuilding years (finished 16th, 13th, 14th and 15th over the last four seasons respectively).

But those trade moves initially received backlash over fears the club had cut too deep, with Ben McEvoy, Liam Shiels, Jack Gunston and Kyle Hartigan also departing that off-season - totalling 1181 games of experience out the door - leaving Hawthorn's list bare of reliable senior players.

Some even argued it was a form of tanking in a ploy to land Harley Reid.

"This is a complete reset to win a premiership. This is not about being competitive for the now - you'd want to do that anyway - this is about the draft," Hawks champion Dermott Brereton said on Fox Footy in October 2022.

Asked if Hawthorn cut too deep, Brereton said: "There's always that risk ... but you've got to risk and reward in this caper," noting Mitchell was putting a ton of faith into his youngsters.

Fair to say they've repaid him.

The Hawks long preached the logic behind the moves was that having too many veterans in key roles would've hindered the likes of Will Day and Jai Newcombe getting real midfield opportunities.

It's these names - as well as the likes of Connor Macdonald, Conor Nash and James Worpel that have really shined with more responsibilities - openings they mightn't have otherwise been afforded if not for a clear changing of the guard strategy.

"It was exciting for us as younger players at the time to have the backing from Sam and the coaches to think we were going to be good enough," Newcombe told foxfooty.com.au this week.

"'Worps' (Worpel) had been here for a while and knew the ins and outs of the AFL game. We haven't done it on our own, there's been plenty of people help us along the way.

"Nashy's growth as a midfielder has been huge for what we've been able to do as a collective. We've got some exciting young guys coming through like Cam McKenzie and Henry Hustwaite.

"Finn Maginness has been pushing us along the whole way, he's been a driving force in making sure we're always pushing ourselves to get the best out of each other."

Going through the list and there's so many other great success stories of players that have blossomed under Mitchell before you look at the recent recruits (more on that soon).

James Sicily has flourished as skipper. Dylan Moore is an All-Australian. Jack Scrimshaw has become a super reliable defender. Mitch Lewis looks like a Coleman Medal contender when healthy. Blake Hardwick has turned into a real weapon. And the likes of Josh Weddle and McKenzie have bright futures.

But really, the sum is greater than its parts and the overall fusion and chemistry of this side is what makes it so great.

There's a belief in footy that rebuilding teams should be brutal with moving on veterans to ensure they don't hold back opportunities for youngsters. Hawthorn embraced this approach as aggressively as any side before it ... and it's paying passive dividends.
TOPPING UP
Much has been made of the Hawks' 2023 trade period home run moves, but its shrewd wheeling and dealing started 12 months earlier.

The Hawks in the 2022 off-season landed Karl Amon for nothing as a free agent and got ruckman Lloyd Meek from Fremantle in the O'Meara trade. Tick and tick.

They then backed that up by bringing in Jack Ginnivan, Massimo D'Ambrosio, Mabior Chol and the returning Gunston on bargain deals 11 months ago to beef up their budding core. Tick, tick, tick and tick.

Not only would the above quartet all have claims of being in the top five recruits of 2024, the Hawks didn't surrender a single first-round pick to land any of them. And so the Hawks were the clear winners of last year's trade period given those individual wins before you even consider the success of their season.

Massive props to list boss Mark McKenzie and his team.

In fact, D'Ambrosio the one who cost the least in a trade sense (Pick 61), has probably had the best campaign of any of them.

Of course, the likes of Breust (rookie draft), Sicily (Pick 56), Hardwick (Pick 44), Moore (Pick 67), Worpel (Pick 45), Newcombe (mid-season draft), Nash, (rookie draft) and Calsher Dear (Pick 56) were all plucked on the cheap too.

So in many ways, like the Hawks' story this year, it's a team of underdogs.

And not giving up draft capital in recent times has importantly allowed Hawthorn to continue to prioritise the draft at the same time.

It includes the Hawks picking up Nick Watson and Dear in last year's draft. Watson (18 goals) and Dear (21) along with fellow recruits Ginnivan (25 goals), Chol (36 goals) and Gunston (28 goals) - five of Hawthorn's eight leading goalkickers in 2024 - have combined for 128 majors to play a key role in the club's rise.

"You throw in Ginnivan, Watson, Chol, Dear and Gunston as all new - it's five of your seven forwards really. No wonder it took us a little while to click," Breust told foxfooty.com.au this week.

"The freedom we have within the system is one of the key parts - being able to play on flair and instinct. Even in our golden era during team meetings it always like: 'Let's not overcomplicate things, we've got some talent in the forward line, let's get the ball in and play for each other and be predictable'.

"They bring it out themselves and love expressing themselves in their own way. Throw a bit of system into that and really good pressure and we've found a secret recipe that's working for us at the moment.

"The growth across the board too from the younger guys and Chol's resurgence ... throw all that in the mix and a couple of old wise heads in myself and Jack and you've got a group that's pretty tough to defend and we'd back ourselves in against any backline."

Recruiting players from rival clubs has clearly been an important part of this rebuild - eight Hawks that will line up against the Dogs on Friday night were acquired from other teams.

And while Hawthorn missed out on the likes of Ben McKay and Esava Ratugolea last trade period in targets that could've really shored up Sam Mitchell's side defensively with that big defensive boulder it still lacks, the Hawks are set to add both Tom Barrass and Josh Battle this off-season in a scary prospect for 2025.
HEALTHY FOOTBALL ARROGANCE
There's one thing in all of this that can't be quantified - Hawthorn's healthy football arrogance.

An 'I'm better than you' confidence that helped it blow both Collingwood (by 66 points) and Carlton (74 points) off the MCG.

This Hawks side is basically the first Generation Z team we've seen in the AFL, with a youthful exuberance of wide eyes kids not shy to express themselves out on the field.

From the quirky hairstyles and brazen goal celebrations inspired by international sporting stars to the team selfies after wins, Hawthorn's flashy exploits has at times divided footy people.

But ultimately, it's just a group of young men having the time of their lives out there ... and who can knock players for having fun in such an intense industry at times? Particularly so long as the Hawks back it up with their actual play - which they've done in spades with an attractive, flashy and daring to brand as good to watch as any side.

"A lot of the boys enjoy the celebrations and I think it's really good, it gets the fans involved as well and they love it," 20-year old Hawk Josh Weddle told foxfooty.com.au this week.

"It creates an energy for us when we're out there. It's made this love for the group.

"It's a bit of a talking point sometimes at training if anyone is going to pull out any new celebrations. We'll keep riding that little Rascal pack and see where it goes.

"We enjoy ourselves and have fun, it's a game you played as a kid back in the day, so treat it like that sometimes."

We already saw the success the likes of Richmond and Collingwood experienced in recent years embracing a more happy go lucky and laid-back approach.

Plus, it's this self confidence that could be their greatest strength this September if they're not overawed by the big occasion. Why not Hawthorn? It's form from May onwards stacks up as well as any contender, while the young guns could really thrive in front of massive 80,000-plus crowds.

In fact, Hawthorn has this intangible, innate belief and spirit you can't necessarily say the other contenders have.

Kangaroos great David King has previously referred to them as the 'no-fear Hawks' and even drawn comparisons to the NBA's 1980s 'Showtime Lakers' for putting bums on seats.

While that Lakers team was very much synonymous for its pizzazz and glamorous style, it also won five NBA championships.

So like some of the most legendary Hawthorn teams before it, could these young Hawks be tracking towards their own golden era? They won't need any encouragement to dare to dream.

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'Complete reset to win a flag': The bold calls, shrewd trades that set up shock Hawks rise

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'Got to risk': The bold calls, shrewd trades that set up shock rise of AFL flag smoky

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_co46fS2bY/?igsh=YTd5NjlneDd5dDJy

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https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/jana-hocking-on-whether-everyones-a-bit-abrosexual/news-story/205eedcb339ac1ada569d65a87192237?amp=

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Lots of Albo Australianisms quoted here to mine...

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Lots of Albo Australianisms quoted here to mine...

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Nuku'alofa, Tonga: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused a New Zealand journalist of behaving unethically for recording his conversation with a senior Biden administration official about a landmark policing pact on the sidelines of a major Pacific forum in Tonga.

As Albanese returned to Australia on Thursday afternoon after spending a day on a private retreat with Pacific leaders on a remote Tongan island, the opposition accused him of behaving in an "unedifying" way by blaming the young reporter for the hot mic-style incident.

In his candid chat with US President Joe Biden's Indo-Pacific guru, Kurt Campbell, Albanese expressed his delight at locking in support for the Pacific Policing Initiative from members of the Pacific Islands Forum, joking about the US paying half of the $400 million Australia will spend on the pact.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was caught on a live camera discussing policy with Kurt Campbell. Credit: AAP

The policing project was widely seen as a blow to China's efforts to woo countries in the Pacific to work with its law enforcement as it competes with the US for influence in the strategically significant region.

In remarks that could raise eyebrows in Beijing and some Pacific capitals, Campbell, the US deputy secretary of state, appeared to suggest that the Biden administration was planning a related initiative but backed away after discussions with Australia's ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd.

"Well, we had a cracker today getting the Pacific Policing Initiative through - it's so important, it'll make such a difference," Albanese told Campbell in Tonga on Wednesday in an exchange filmed and uploaded to social media by Radio New Zealand reporter Lydia Lewis.

"It's great that you did that," Campbell replied.

"I talked to Kevin [Rudd] about it and we were going to do something and he asked us not to, so we did not. We've given you the lane, so take the lane."

Albanese responded: "We can go halvies on the cost if you like."

Realising what was taking place, Pacific Minister Pat Conroy chastised Lewis for filming the encounter, which took place during a break in official proceedings at the leaders' plenary.

Mark Stevens, the chief news officer of Radio New Zealand, defended Lewis, saying: "Having spoken to our reporter, there is nothing to suggest they acted unethically or outside our rigorous editorial policies."

Beijing regularly portrays Australia as little more than a proxy for US interests in the region, accusing it of behaving as America's "deputy sheriff" and seeking to drag Pacific nations into a Cold War-style superpower conflict.

Pressed about the matter on Thursday, Albanese told reporters to "chill out" and disputed that Campbell had said the US had pulled out of a similar initiative to let Australia take the lead.

"It was a private conversation, a jovial conversation and a friendly one," Albanese said, describing Campbell as a "mate of mine".

New Zealand journalist Lydia Lewis said she caught the exchange while filming background footage. Credit: AAP

"The video is what it is: it's up to whoever did that to think about their own ethics when it comes to journalism."

Growing frustrated with the line of questioning, Albanese continued: "If people try to read something into it, you must be pretty bored ... journalists tend to identify themselves, I hope you do."

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said it was "pretty unedifying for the prime minister to blame a journalist for his own indiscretions".

"Why is he picking on some young New Zealand journalist, singling her out for just doing her job?" he said.

"He's engaging in a newsworthy conversation in a public arena. He can expect to be filmed, and it's up to him to provide the decorum that is required in that environment."

In a piece for Radio New Zealand, Lewis said she caught the exchange while filming "cutaways" - background footage used for broadcast news stories.

Responding to the incident on social media, Greens defence spokesman David Shoebridge said: "Why are Labor and the Coalition so committed to being US toadies, so afraid to have an independent foreign or defence policy for Australia?

"Our neighbours see this and rightly treat us with suspicion."

Lowy Institute analyst Mihai Sora said Campbell's comments were surprising, and "show he had misunderstood the importance of Pacific leadership on matters of regional security".

"The Pacific is not the United States' lane to give," he said.

Blake Johnson, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, disagreed, saying Campbell's account of his conversation with Rudd showed "a bit of self-awareness and good co-operation between Australia and the US".

"It's great if the US said, 'We won't try to clog up space and confuse the matter'," he said, adding it was best for the US to focus its energies on helping the Pacific on infrastructure rather than policing.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.

Connect via Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Twitter or Facebook.

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Albanese's anger over hot-mic moment 'unedifying': Coalition

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The prime minister jokingly suggested the US could share the cost of Australia's $400 million Pacific police partnership deal, widely seen as countering China.

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Australian Li Tu calling his opponent a "specimen" and a "beast"

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Australian Li Tu calling his opponent a "specimen" and a "beast"

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Here's the tiktok if you prefer: https://www.tiktok.com/@espn_australia_nz/video/7408398271992925446

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Li Tu shares how he reacted after seeing Carlos Alcaraz take his jacket off before their US Open match started

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Emoji are used to punctuate sentences - can you recognise this trend from your own or your peers' texts?

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Don't be alarmed if you see young people use increasingly macabre emojis online. In the past few years, for instance, the skull emoji has transformed into a symbol to communicate humor or irony. Much like an exclamation point or question mark, it can serve to both separate text and contextualize how a sentence should be understood. For example: I just wrote a Washington Post op-ed on Gen Z slang 💀

Although it might seem silly, the skull in my sentence serves a very important function. If I texted this to a friend without the emoji, it would either come across as boastful or oddly formal. Punctuating the text with a skull lightens the tone and signals humility by shifting attention to the absurdity of the situation.

In this sense, the emoji is a tone tag - a character specifying the message's intent. You're very aware of this concept, even if you don't know it. Exclamation points are just tone tags indicating excitement, while question marks signal curiosity or confusion. People have tried introducing tone tags for irony before: In the late 1580s, English printer Henry Denham proposed a "percontation point" (⸮) for rhetorical questions. Other iterations of the "irony mark" popped up in the late 17th century - an inverted exclamation point (¡) - and, more recently, in 2010 - through a swirly character called the "SarcMark" - but nothing caught on.

These didn't work for a few reasons. They were hard to standardize and were largely unnecessary in a time when most informal communication was happening in person, where marking tone is easy. If you find something funny, you laugh and people know what that means. But now we have to mark tone in informal communication online, which requires us to navigate an uncertain, ambiguous medium open to misinterpretation. If you're not careful, you come across sounding passive-aggressive; too careful, you come across sounding unnatural.

Thankfully, the emoji keyboard presented a readily accessible and standardized solution. Since 2011, we've been able to indicate laughing through the laughing-crying emoji, which became so widely used that the Oxford English Dictionary chose it as its 2015 Word of the Year.

However, this very popularity, coupled with our constant need to mark tone online, led to overuse. Suddenly, things had grown so "funny" that we were weeping tears of joy all the time, meaning that it was hard to distinguish when someone was actually laughing versus just trying to lighten the tone.

A similar phenomenon happened with the words "lol" and "lmao." Younger generations are now expressing humorous reactions through sentences like "LITERALLY CRYING," which, somehow, I'm still guilty of typing with an expressionless face.

Our escalating vocabulary for showing what we find funny has likewise led to a dizzying cycle of emoji evolution, since tone tags change just like words do. Once the laughing-crying emoji became passé, we mirrored the expression "I'm crying" with the crying emoji, and once that lost its appeal, we turned to the skull emoji, drawing on the idea of being "dead" from laughing.

This is part of a linguistic process called "semantic bleaching." The more we use a charged word, the more its original meaning is diluted until it's lost altogether and needs to be replaced. This isn't new. We've been semantically bleaching since words like "very" (which comes from Old French verai, meaning "truthfully") and "really" (which once meant "in reality"). Eventually, the intensifiers became oversaturated for expressing sincerity, so now we just use them to add emotional weight to statements.

The skull emoji, too, is already becoming overused. In the sentence I just wrote a Washington Post op-ed on Gen Z slang💀, I'm not using the emoji to cue laughter, as I once might have. Instead, I'm lightening my statement and, in the process, becoming another perpetrator of semantic bleaching. We're already starting to see new tone tags emerge for genuine laughter, like the tombstone to say, "No really, I'm actually dead."

These tone tags capture the culture of Gen Z, the first cohort to grow up entirely in the context of smartphone communication. We're speeding through the age-old bleaching process because of our unprecedented experience of navigating online ambiguity. For better or worse, we're locked into a complicated parade of punctuation, constantly relegating expressions of excitement in favor of their newer, trendier alternatives.

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In the past few years, the skull emoji has transformed into a symbol for younger people to communicate humor or irony.

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Linking to the LGBTQIA+ community, an origin for the "demure" linguistic trend to help shape some examples.

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Jools Lebron, the TikToker who has helped launch the word 'demure' back into the stratosphere, has shared that she'll be able to finance the rest of her transition after the release of her viral video.

Lebron posted her original TikTok on August 6th, which began with the instantly iconic line: "You see how I do my makeup for work? Very demure, very mindful." The incredible elegance of her words has spread like wildfire, with over 46,000 TikToks using Lebron's original audio now created.

With a post from Bob the Drag Queen, encouragement on a 'demure' version of the dance from Charli xcx and even a White House post quoting the TikTok, Lebron's original video has rapidly launched her and the word she so perfectly encapsulates into the stratosphere.

In a subsequent video, Lebron revealed that the TikTok going viral has changed her life. "One day, I was playing cashier and making videos on my break. Now, I'm flying cross country to host events, and I'm gonna be able to finance the rest of my transition!"

Her emotional update about her life received a heap of support in the comments section, with practically every single one including demure into their support. "Hope your transition goes smoothly and very demure 💗✨" said one user, while another said: "You see how she keeps a steady career? Very polite, very demure✨✨✨"

With a thriving Cameo page and more TikToks using her sound popping up by the day, it won't be surprising if we're yet to see much more of Miss Demure!

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'Demure' TikToker Now Able To Finance Her Gender-Affirming Care - Star Observer

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Jools Lebron, the TikToker who's been taking the world by storm with her viral video, has shared a very demure update with fans!

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Feature of Australian identity at an Australian awards show

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Celia Pacquola has revealed she was given a telling off from Channel Seven after she dropped the F-bomb live on-air during the 2024 Logie Awards.

The TV star, 41, shocked fans when she made an X-rated comment while presenting alongside Luke McGregor at Sunday night's star-studded awards ceremony.

She dropped the F-bomb live after noticing a glaring error on the autocue while the event was being broadcast live by Channel Seven.

'The nominees for "Best Lead Actor in a Drama" are...that's incorrect...no it's not that (category), it's the "Best Drama Program,"' Celia said of the mistake live on-air.

She shocked viewers by adding: 'someone at Channel Seven has f**ked me' while a pre-recorded package of the nominees began, eliciting much laughter in the room.

Appearing on KIIS FM's Will and Woody just days after the ceremony, the Rosehaven star has admitted she was given a talking-to from a Channel Seven employee for her X-rated remark.

She said of her chat with a Seven representative: 'They just went, "hey, I work at Channel Seven" and I was like, "sorry. But also, I don't work for you!'

Celia went on to claim that the network threw her 'under the bus' with the mistake on the autocue, before confessing that she was 'proud' of her antics.

'They threw me out under the bus! I just read it (the autocue), and you're welcome for me giving the broadcast a little bit of sizzle,' she said during Thursday's show.

'It was funny and it wasn't my fault. I just read the thing.'

After footage of Celia's F-bomb went viral on after the Logies, the media personality revealed that some of her fans have even suggested immortalising her statement.

'I've been getting messages... people are like, "we're gonna have it on a T-shirt!",' she quipped. 'I've got a new catchphrase now!

'Which is weird, because I've just gotten used to people saying, "thank God you're here" when they saw me.

'Now I've got to get used to people going, "Celia, someone on Channel Seven has f**ked me".'

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Celia Pacquola reveals she was told off after THAT Logies F-bomb

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Celia Pacquola has revealed she was 'spoken to' by Channel Seven after she dropped the F-bomb live on-air during the Logies this year.

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Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of 'linguistic relativity' or the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity - it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?

The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century. Enlightenment discussions were often couched in terms of the 'genius' of a language, an expression first coined in French as de la langue. The term was used in a wide variety of senses, to the point where it was often not clear what precisely was meant. One contemporary commentator remarked: '[W]e often ask what is the genius of a language, and it is difficult to say.' What we can say is that the genius of a language was understood as representing its distinct character, the sais quoi that constitutes the idiomatic in each idiom. This unique character was frequently taken to embody something of the national mentality of the speakers of a language.

A classic - and highly influential - formulation came in 1772 with the Treatise on the Origin of Language by the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). In opposition to contemporaries who saw the ultimate origins of human language in animal cries, Herder insisted that there is a difference in kind between human and animal communication. Human language, so Herder argued, rests on the irreducible human capacity for 'reflection' ( Besonnenheit), our ability to recognise and think about our own thoughts. In coining our words, we reflect on the properties of the things they name, and choose the most salient of these. Different peoples will have focused on different properties, with the result that each language with its characteristic forms will encapsulate a slightly different perspective on the world. As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct. In order to understand the unique perspective of each language, we must trace the forms of words back to their etymological origins.

The Herderian thread was picked up in the early 19th century and woven most expertly into a broader account of language and literature by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt endorsed an element of linguistic determinism - that is, that language not only reflects a particular worldview but is actively involved in shaping it: 'Language,' he wrote , 'is the forming organ of thought.' The relationship he envisaged, however, was not one-way but dialectic. Between language and thought there inheres an endless feedback loop: our thoughts shape our words, and our words shape our thoughts. His account was not restricted to individual words - more important were the grammatical structures exhibited in the languages of the world. But even the study of grammar was only a preliminary to the real task, according to Humboldt. Grammar and vocabulary merely represent the 'dead skeleton' of a language. To capture its character, to see its 'living structure', we must appreciate its literature, the use made of the language by its most eloquent speakers and writers.

The inner form of a language, Steinthal believed, was the perfect window to the national mind

Despite Humboldt's exhortations to seek the life of language in literature, his successors in the 19th century concentrated on devising classifications of languages revolving around their grammatical features. The goal was often described as identifying the 'inner form' of each language. 'Inner form' was a term used by Humboldt (although only fleetingly) to refer to the underlying structure and organisation of a language, as opposed to its 'outer form', the externally perceptible features of its words, grammar and sound system. Humboldt's inner form carries forward the concerns of the Enlightenment's genius of a language, while the outer form consists of the pedantic details of noun declensions, verb conjugations, regular sound substitutions and so on.

Many scholars working in Humboldt's wake adopted his 'inner form' and developed it in different directions, although the most prominent version of this notion was that elaborated by Heymann Steinthal (1823-99). Inner form served as the centrepiece of Steinthal's classification of languages, which in turn lay at the heart of his Völkerpsychologie, the 'psychology of peoples' or 'ethnopsychology'. The overarching aim of Völkerpsychologie was to describe the supposed shared mentality of each nation. The inner form of a language, so believed Steinthal, was the perfect window to this national mind.

But during the course of the 19th century, talk of national minds and the character of languages fell out of fashion in the academic study of language. In this period, comparative-historical grammar became established as the premier field of linguistics. This is the approach that carefully compares words and grammatical forms across languages in order to chart their historical changes and identify their putative genealogical relations. Comparative-historical linguistics tells us, for example, that French, Italian and Spanish are all descended from Latin; that Hindi-Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi can trace their ancestry to Sanskrit; and that all these languages, along with many others traditionally spoken from western Europe to northern India, are part of the extended Indo-European family.

The hypothetical progenitor of this great family, Proto-Indo-European, has been lost to time, but elements of its vocabulary, grammar and sound system can be reconstructed from the traits of its descendants. Crucially, these are all aspects of the 'outer form' of languages - and the linguists who investigated these outer forms preferred to describe the historical transmutations they studied in terms of 'sound laws'. Sound laws are mere statements of fact, that a sound attested in a certain phonetic environment in a parent language changes into other sounds in its descendants. Such accounts avoid invoking any hidden, underlying explanatory principles. Most comparative-historical grammarians believed that, for linguistics to be considered a serious science, it must limit itself to solid, objectively observable data. Uncovering the inner life of languages, capturing their characters and connections to thought and culture, were at best seen as future tasks for a thoroughly grounded science of language. At worst, they were taken to be nothing more than idle metaphysical speculation.

In what was the last gasp of the Humboldtian tradition in academic linguistics of the 19th century, the sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-93) proposed a new subfield of 'typology', which would exhaustively survey the grammatical features of the world's languages in order to discover the 'typical traits, the ruling tendencies' that determine linguistic structure. This undertaking would provide an empirical foundation for the 'highest task' of linguistics, explaining such structural tendencies as manifestations of the national mind. Gabelentz's call for the new field fell on deaf ears in this age dominated by historical-comparative grammar. Typology would re-emerge as a mainstream pursuit in linguistics only in the early 20th century.

In this same period, on the other side of the Atlantic, questions of mind and language did enjoy currency in a Humboldtian-inflected anthropology. Franz Boas (1858-1942), the 'father' of American anthropology, set out to compile the definitive compendium of the Indigenous languages of North America in his multi-volume Handbook of American Indian Languages, the first volume of which appeared in 1911. The grammatical descriptions contained in Boas's handbook were to 'depend entirely upon the inner form of each language'. 'In other words,' Boas elaborated, 'the grammar has been treated as though an intelligent Indian was going to develop the forms of his own thoughts by an analysis of his own form of speech.'

But Boas was beset by an ambivalence about the implications of the mind-language nexus. Nineteenth-century discourse on the differences between nations was all too often predicated on an assumed hierarchy of humanity. There was a widespread belief that the peoples extant in the world today had reached different stages of evolution in their societies and cultures - and that this was attributable to differences in their cognitive abilities. At the top of the hierarchy was 19th-century European man, who had unfolded his mental powers in all directions, while at the bottom were the various Indigenous peoples of the world, usually believed to be stuck in an eternal childhood of humanity or to have degenerated from a previous state of 'civilisation'.

Attitudes were not monolithic: there were many different schemes of human social, cultural and cognitive evolution in this period, admitting of many nuances. But even such figures as Humboldt, Steinthal and Gabelentz, who revelled in human diversity and praised the uniqueness of each language, were more partial to some languages than to others. American languages, argued Steinthal, actually have no inner form. The indisputably complex constructions attested in their grammars are merely mash-ups of concrete conceptual material without any underlying formal structure. Attitudes at the time among the leading anthropologists and linguists in the United States were even more extreme.

Anthropologists continued to consider possible connections between language and mind

Boas pushed back against such prejudiced schemes. He actually agreed with his opponents about the existence of some alleged deficits in Indigenous languages, but refused to see these as an index of mental development. Many American languages lack abstract terms and indefinitely large numbers, conceded Boas, but this is not because their speakers are incapable of grasping such concepts. It is simply the case that they have never had need to talk in abstract terms or count to higher numbers, and so have never had occasion to produce such forms in their languages. If this need arose, their languages would soon adapt.

Boas's views were largely inspired by the teachings of his former mentor in Berlin, the ethnographer Adolf Bastian (1826-1905). Bastian advocated the principle of the 'psychic unity of mankind', the idea that all humans, no matter what their ancestry or their present cultural condition, have at base the same mental faculties and abilities. The apparently differing 'ethnic thoughts' of the various peoples of the world are merely different arrangements of the same 'elementary thoughts' common to all humanity. The human mind is essentially the same everywhere.

We therefore see in the 19th century a clear arc in the development of academic attitudes towards linguistic relativity. At the beginning of the century, linguistic relativity was a respectable position in the study of language, buoyed by the writings of such figures as Herder and Humboldt. But as the century wore on, academic linguistics became increasingly dominated by the school of comparative-historical grammarians, whose approach was highly technical and empirical in character. In this intellectual environment, linguists gradually turned away from the seemingly nebulous questions about the underlying conceptual apparatuses of languages. Anthropologists, by contrast, continued throughout the 19th century to consider possible connections between language and mind, but the hierarchical terms in which their discussions were often framed came under criticism towards the end of the century, in a movement spearheaded by Boas.

The latter-day 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis' is in many respects a continuation of the 19th-century debates. Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) were heirs to the Humboldtian tradition. Sapir was steeped in German language scholarship: his Master's thesis was on Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language. He was also one of Boas's most talented and devoted pupils, and perpetuated his teacher's positions. 'Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven,' wrote Sapir in 1921, 'are, in a sense, one and the same.' But, like Boas, he insisted that there are no 'significant racial differences' in thought across the human species, and no direct connections between culture and language. It is therefore impossible to infer alleged evolutionary stages from language structure: 'When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.'

Despite the desire to extricate his research from the prejudices of past scholarship, Sapir was still invested in the project of analysing the grammatical 'processes' and 'concepts' attested in the languages of the world in order to identify the 'type or plan or structural "genius"' of each language. But this endeavour was tempered by a belief in the at least partial autonomy of linguistic form. On Sapir's account, every language possesses an 'inner phonetic system' and 'a definite feeling for patterning on the level of grammatical formation', both of which 'operate as such, regardless of the need for expressing particular concepts or of giving external shape to particular groups of concepts.' Language, it would seem, was not quite so stuck in those thought-grooves.

Treating linguistic form as in some way autonomous was implicit in the 19th-century comparative-historical grammarians' postulation of sound laws. In the 20th century, an explicit move was made by many linguists to hive off language structure as their private domain, an object they could investigate independently of any broader questions of cognition or the physical production and reception of speech. In these years, the Genevan linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) introduced a distinction between (language) and (speech), a distinction that has become fundamental to much subsequent linguistic scholarship. is the abstract, self-contained system of each language, while is the use of to create actual utterances. Linguists, argued Saussure, should describe the properties of each langue without worrying about how it is instantiated in the minds and mouths of speakers. These are problems for the neighbouring sciences of psychology, physiology and physics. Sapir's avowal of the formal autonomy of languages can be understood as part of this trend, even though at the same time he clearly did not wish to entirely relinquish his Humboldtian heritage, with its psychological and anthropological concerns.

There was a desire to break the spell of language, to revolt against its tyranny

But what about the linguistic determinism of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Although neither Sapir nor Whorf ever formulated any precise, testable proposition postulating the influence of language on thought, they certainly envisaged such effects. In 1929, Sapir wrote:

The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group ... The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached ... We see and hear and otherwise experience largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Sapir and Whorf's rhetoric answered to a contemporary moral panic about the use and abuse of language. The young 20th century saw public discourse perverted by new forms of propaganda, disseminated by such new technologies as radio and film, all of which accompanied and facilitated the catastrophic upheavals of the First World War and the political polarisation that resulted in the rise of totalitarian governments across Europe. There was a desire to break the spell of language, to revolt against its tyranny supporting irrationality and barbarity, and make it the servant of enlightened thought. This sentiment found expression in, among other places, the linguistic turn taken by the incipient analytic philosophy of this period. At the popularising end of the spectrum, innumerable manuals on meaning appeared, such as The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by C K Ogden and I A Richards, Science and Sanity (1933) by Alfred Korzybski, and The Tyranny of Words (1938) by Stuart Chase. This is the world of Orwell's Newspeak, in which language is the master of mind.

Sapir and Whorf eagerly advertised the contribution their field of linguistics could make to solving these problems. In revealing the diversity of realities created by languages, linguistics could help to expose how language misleads us. In 1924, Sapir wrote:

Perhaps the best way to get behind our thought processes and to eliminate from them all the accidents or irrelevances due to their linguistic garb is to plunge into the study of exotic modes of expression. At any rate, I know of no better way to kill spurious 'entities'.

By the mid-20th century, language-critical discourse had died down and academic linguistics largely returned to the dispassionate scientism familiar from the end of the previous century. Assessing several claimed cases of links between language structure and culture across a diverse range of languages, the US linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) declared mid-century: '[O]ne does not find any underlying semantic patterns such as would be required for the semantic system of a language to reflect some over-all world view of a metaphysical nature.'

Greenberg was inspired by the work of Boas and Sapir, and reignited the torch of linguistic typology that had been raised up by Gabelentz at the end of the 19th century. Greenberg's continuation of the old Humboldtian project of investigating the structural diversity of the world's languages while disavowing any connection between structure and cognition or culture was decisive for the later development of typological theory. What for Gabelentz had been the 'highest task' of language research was now officially off limits in the last corner of linguistics concerned with capturing and comparing the grammatical character of languages.

Interest in diversity was in any case at a low point in the mid-20th century. In his pursuit of 'universal grammar', Noam Chomsky (1928-) strove to re-establish a kind of psychic unity of mankind. The differences between individual languages, on Chomsky's account, are mere phantoms, superficial variations on the same underlying system produced by an innate faculty of language shared by all humans. The linguist's task should not be to meticulously catalogue these variants, but to factor them out and discover the universal principles governing all languages. Following Chomsky's lead, received opinion in most quarters of academic research maintained this fastidious separation of language and thought until the end of the 20th century.

But linguistic relativity would not suffer banishment. Linguists and psychologists who could not ignore these questions have brought relativity back into the academic mainstream and delivered solid results. To name just one example, in ongoing, cutting-edge work, researchers have shown that certain languages may allow their speakers to unlock senses that are the common possession of all humans but remain unutilised by most people. In English and many other languages, spatial location is usually described in egocentric terms. If a fly were to land on my leg, I might say: 'A fly has landed on the right side of my leg.' Right is an egocentric spatial term that orients objects in the world according to an imaginary left-right axis projected from my body.

We are all, in a sense, compasses. English speakers are, mostly, not consciously aware of this

However, this is not the only way we can conceptualise space. In the Gurindji language, spoken in northern Australia - as in many other languages of the world - locations are usually described using the cardinal directions north, south, east and west. Assuming that I am sitting so my right leg is oriented towards the west, the equivalent sentence in Gurindji would be: ' Karlarnimpalnginyi nyawama wurturrjima, walngin ngayinyja wurturrjila.' Literally: 'This is the outer upper west of (my) leg. The fly landed here on my leg.' If I were to turn around and face the opposite direction, the fly would still - in egocentric terms - be on the right side of my leg, but a Gurindji speaker would point out that - in cardinal terms - the fly is now on the eastern part of my leg. While my private left-right axis might follow me around dutifully, the earth will always stand still.

The cardinal directions are not unknown in English, but they are typically employed only when talking on a geographical scale. By contrast, in Gurindji, even parts of the speaker's body are located in a world-spanning co-ordinate system. Most English speakers would be at a loss to even identify the cardinal directions without the aid of a compass. How do Gurindji speakers do it? It would seem that they draw on a number of environmental cues, chief among these the course of the sun through the sky. But human neurophysiology is also sensitive to the magnetic field of Earth: the human brain responds in measurable ways to ambient magnetic fields. We are all, in a sense, compasses. English speakers are for the most part not consciously aware of this, even though their brain activity changes when surrounding magnetic fields are manipulated under experimental conditions. Recent experiments by the Australian linguist Felicity Meakins and her collaborators have shown that some Gurindji speakers can reliably report on shifts in ambient magnetic fields.

Gurindji speakers' habit of using cardinal directions would seem to have opened up their powers of perception. At least some Gurindji speakers may be able to consciously feel Earth's magnetic field. But do English speakers and Gurindji speakers live in 'distinct worlds', as Sapir would have it? Having greater sensitivity to some features of the environment still seems like something less than the all-encompassing, incommensurable worldviews of the Humboldtian tradition.

This is perhaps the chief source of the continuing scepticism regarding linguistic relativity in many academic quarters. We start with a feeling, an ineffable sais quoi, that our language shapes our world. But to assess the truth of this claim, the scientist wants a hypothesis - a rigorous, experimentally testable statement of precisely how language shapes our world. Quasi-mystical meditations on my life in language are not the stuff of modern scientific journals. But any properly formulated hypothesis will necessarily be reductive and deflationary - devising empirical tests of the supposed differences in our worldviews inevitably means transforming our innermost feelings into detached, foreign objects that we can observe and analyse from the outside. Such tests can arguably never capture the totality and primordiality of the original feeling.

Does this mean that the scholarship of previous centuries has no place in today's world or, alternatively, that modern science simply cannot fathom the philosophical depths explored by earlier work? Past and present scholarship are complementary. The writings of earlier scholars - however speculative they may seem to us now, and whatever problematic assumptions they may be built upon - undeniably capture something of our human experience and can inform the investigations of present-day researchers. In turn, the hypotheses and experiments of latter-day linguists and psychologists provide another perspective - shaped by the scientistic worldview of our own era - on these enduring questions of the connections between mind and language. In all these cases, we cannot even make sense of the questions without understanding something of the specific intellectual contexts in which they have arisen.

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Does language mirror the mind? An intellectual history | Aeon Essays

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Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true? History shines a light

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Some nice examples you can pull out of her downplaying the severity of the situation, trying to promote social harmony and also portraying an Australian identity through her use of slang. (Thanks Emily Lawson for tipping me off on this!)

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Georgie Purcell: Adobe casts doubt that Photoshop automation was to blame for Nine News editing of her image

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Adobe casts doubt on claim ‘automation by Photoshop’ was to blame as network apologises for image shown during bulletin

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In 2012, The Sun newspaper reported that the British MP Andrew Mitchell, then a prominent member of the UK government, had called a group of police officers 'fucking plebs'. According to that story, the police thought about arresting him, but decided against it. In the wake of 'plebgate' (as this incident has become known), several journalists pointed to a double standard: Mitchell managed to escape arrest, but among the rest of us, arrests for swearing at the police are far from unheard of. These arrests have happened under Section 5 of the Public Order Act. People arrested under Section 5 can be issued with a Fixed Penalty Notice, and convictions can result in a fine. Swearing, it seems, can be a big deal. But why?

The Cambridge University Press's online dictionary defines swearing as 'rude or offensive language that someone uses, especially when they are angry'. Thinking of swearing as 'rude or offensive language' is a good start, but it is too rough for our purposes. For one thing, 'rude or offensive language' need not involve swearing at all. I am rude or offensive when I tell you that your new baby is hideous, when I accept your thoughtful gift without thanks, or when I crack a tasteless joke about death after you reveal that you have a terminal illness. Some definitions of swearing get around this issue by specifying that swearing should involve taboo (ie forbidden) language - but even this is not specific enough. Taboo language includes not only the familiar, bog-standard swear words like that mentioned above, but also other sorts of words that are not my focus here.

A category of non-swearing taboo language is blasphemous expressions and words that are otherwise unspeakable for certain religious groups. Another category is slurs: words that deride entire groups of people, and that are often associated with hate speech. In slurring someone - for example, by calling them a faggot - you express contempt not only for the person you are addressing, but also for a wider group to which they may belong; in this case, homosexual men. By contrast, in yelling 'Fuck you!' at someone, you do not express contempt for anyone other than the person you are addressing. The dividing line between swears and slurs is not clear-cut (we view 'cunt' as a swear, but it is deemed by some to be so universally offensive to women that it might be appropriate to view it as a slur too). The line between swears and religious taboo language is similarly fuzzy; consider that we can swear using the word 'damn'. However, there is enough of a contrast between swearing and these other categories to make it worth separating them when we consider the ethical issues.

I'll focus here on the non-slurring, non-religious swear words that, in English and many other languages, often have a sexual or a lavatorial theme. So, what's special about these words? What sets them apart from other areas of language?

A clue is provided by the second part of the dictionary definition quoted above: the qualification that people swear 'especially when they are angry'. It's not quite right to link swearing uniquely with anger, but it does have a special role in expressing and communicating emotion. The expressions 'My car has been stolen' and 'For fuck's sake, my fucking car's been stolen!' both assert the same thing, but the second also conveys a sense of anger, desperation, and annoyance, thanks to the inclusion of swearing. As the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has remarked, '[s]wear words don't describe your feelings; they manifest them'. It is this unique role in expressing emotion that separates swearing from other uses of language, including other types of taboo language.

This unique psychological role gives swearing a unique linguistic role, too. Suppose we overhear somebody exclaim 'Fuck it!' when he accidentally spills tea in his lap. We can't grasp the meaning of this exclamation by reflecting on the literal meanings of the words, as we'd do if the speaker had said 'Eat it!' or 'Wash it!' Someone who says 'Fuck it!' after slopping tea in his lap is not expressing a desire to fuck something, nor is he instructing anyone else to fuck something. To understand this exclamation, we need to consider not what the speaker is referring to or talking about, but what he aims to indicate about his emotions. This makes swearing, in such circumstances, more like a scream than an utterance: just like a scream, it expresses emotion without being about anything.

Perhaps this explains why swear words often fail to function like other words. Steven Pinker argues that 'fucking' is not an adjective because, if it were, 'Drown the fucking cat' would be interchangeable with 'Drown the cat which is fucking', just as 'Drown the lazy cat' is interchangeable with 'Drown the cat which is lazy'. Quang Phuc Dong - a sweary pseudonym of the late linguist James D. McCawley - thinks, for various reasons, that 'Fuck you!' is not an imperative (that is, a command) like 'Wash the dishes!' One reason is that, unlike other imperatives, 'Fuck you!' cannot be conjoined with other imperatives in a single sentence. We can say 'Wash the dishes and sweep the floor!', but not 'Wash the dishes and fuck you!' And Nunberg suggests that 'fucking' is not an adverb like 'very' or 'extraordinarily', because while you can say, 'How brilliant was it? Very,' and, 'How brilliant was it? Extraordinarily,' you can't say, 'How brilliant was it? Fucking.'

The philosopher Joel Feinberg remarked that swear words 'acquire their strong expressive power in virtue of an almost paradoxical tension between powerful taboo and universal readiness to disobey'. And, indeed, both in the UK and in many other cultures, we do much to prevent, censor, and punish swearing. This is often done informally: perhaps the most effective way of regulating swearing is through our awareness of attitudes towards it. Knowing that we face disapproval from others if we swear in the wrong context is effective at ensuring that we watch our language. But there are formal efforts to police swearing, too: swearing can get you fired from your job, fined, censored, and even arrested. The taboo against swearing is, it seems, a pretty serious matter.

A clue as to why lies in swearing's focus on taboo topics, and the fact that different cultures give different weight to different taboo themes; for example, in English, blasphemous forms of swearing are relatively rare, and those that do exist - like 'damn' and 'God' - are considered pretty mild these days. But elsewhere, blasphemy plays a much larger role. Perhaps the most striking example is Quebec French, in which the strongest swears are terms relating to Catholicism. These include tabernak (tabernacle), criss (Christ), baptême (baptism), calisse (chalice), and osti (host). Je m'en calisse is equivalent to the English 'I don't give a fuck'. These expressions are considered stronger than standard French swears like merde (shit). They can be amplified by combining them with each other and with standard swears, as in Mon tabernak j'vais te décalliser la yeule, calisse (roughly, 'Motherfucker, I'm gonna fuck you up as fuck'), and Criss de calisse de tabernak d'osti de sacrament (untranslatable expression of anger).

Blasphemy plays a large role in swearing in many religious cultures including Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Spanish - but some highly secular cultures also find religious swearing offensive. Godverdomme (Goddamn) remains one of the strongest expressions in Dutch. Perkele (the name of a pagan deity, now equivalent in meaning to 'the devil'), Saatana (Satan), Jumalauta (literally 'God help', but used in a similar way to the English 'Goddamn'), and Helvetti (hell) are all common and powerful ways of swearing in Finnish. For fanden, For helvede, and For Satan ('For the devil's/hell's/Satan's sake') are widely-used Danish expressions; similarly, fan (Satan), helvete (hell), and jävla (derived from djävul, meaning 'devil') are common Swedish expressions.

While swearing's power derives from taboo-breaking, the fact that swears refer to taboo topics does not explain why swearing itself is taboo

Some swearing is characterised by taboos relating to hierarchy; specifically, expressions of disrespect for certain individuals, commonly the mother of the person insulted. Examples include the Croatian expressions Pička ti materina ('Your mother's cunt') and Jebo ti pas mater ('A dog fucked your mother'); the Filipino Putang-ina ('Whore-mother'); the Romanian Futu-ți dumnezeii mă-tii ('Fuck your mother's gods') and Futu morții mă-tii ('Fuck your mother's dead relatives'); the Spanish Me cago en la leche de tu madre ('I shit in your mother's milk'), Me cago en tu tia ('I shit on your aunt'), and Putamadre ('Whore-mother'); the Turkish Ananı sikeyim ('I fuck your mother'); and the Mandarin 肏你祖宗十八代 ('Fuck your ancestors to the 18th generation'). The expression 'Son of a bitch' has equivalents in many other languages including French ( Fils de pute), German ( Hurensohn), Italian ( Figlio di troia), and Turkish ( Orospu çocuğu); as does 'Motherfucker' (for example, Mutterficker in German and Figlio di puttana in Italian).

Hierarchy and ancestry-themed swearing is less common in English - the expressions 'Motherfucker' and 'Son of a bitch' excepted - but the practice has a lofty historical pedigree. The following mother-disparaging exchange appears in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus:

Demetrius Villain, what hast thou done?
Aaron That which thou canst not undo.
Chiron Thou hast undone our mother.
Aaron Villain, I have done thy mother.

Japanese offers perhaps the most striking example of a hierarchy-themed insult. One of the most effective ways to offend somebody in Japan is to address them as てめ, which is not a swear but a very derogatory form of 'you'.

While swearing's power derives from taboo-breaking, the fact that swears refer to taboo topics does not explain why swearing itself is taboo. There are, after all, inoffensive ways to refer to sensitive topics: we can say 'poo' or 'faeces' instead of 'shit', 'vagina' instead of 'cunt', and so on. While lavatorial and sexual functions are taboo, not all ways of referring to them are indecent. We are still in need of an explanation of what makes 'shit' more offensive than 'poo'.

Some have suggested that the sound that swear words make contributes to their offensiveness. Pinker notes that 'imprecations tend to use sounds that are perceived as quick and harsh', and Kate Warwick hypothesises that the peculiar offensiveness of 'cunt' results from a combination of its meaning and 'the sound of the word and the physical satisfaction of lobbing this verbal hand grenade'. There is something plausible about this. Trying to express anger using a swear word full of gentle, soft sounds - like the words 'whiffy' and 'slush' - would be the verbal equivalent of angrily trying to slam a door fitted with a compressed air hinge. Even so, the sound of swear words cannot fully account for their offensiveness. Many inoffensive words also sound 'quick and harsh', and some have benign alternative meanings (consider 'prick' and 'cock'), or sound identical to parts of inoffensive words ('cunt' sounds identical to the first syllable of 'country' - a fact not lost on either John Donne, who 'sucked on country pleasures', or the anonymous author of the rugby song A Soldier I Will Be).

In any case, focusing on swear words themselves will not enable us to explain fully why they are offensive, because the offensiveness of a given utterance of a swear word is relative to the social and historical context. Swearing at a graveside during a funeral is more likely to cause offence than swearing while in the crowd at a football match, and using 'damn' is less likely to cause offence today than it was several decades ago. We can't account for such contextual variations in swearing's offensiveness by looking solely to features of swearing that do not vary with context, such as what swear words refer to and how they sound. We must look beyond the words themselves, and consider the broader behavioural contexts in which they appear.

Once we do this, the explanation is easier to find. We do, after all, have all sorts of preferences about how people behave. Many of these preferences are enshrined in our morality; others are associated with etiquette. Etiquette dictates that we hold our fork in our left hand and our knife in our right, that we remove hats when entering churches, that we say 'thank you' when people are kind to us, and so on. Etiquette varies with culture and upbringing, and its conventions are applied more strictly in some settings than in others. The fact that we have developed preferences for certain types of behaviour over others, often for apparently no good reason, makes it unsurprising that we should have preferences for certain forms of linguistic behaviour. Swearing is a form of dispreferred linguistic behaviour.

How do we get from this to an explanation of why swearing is offensive? Well, once we have established preferences about behaviour, the capacity for certain behaviour to become offensive arises quite naturally. To illustrate this, consider the following scenario (based on an actual and recurring series of events). Suppose that you make a new friend named Rebecca, and you fall into the habit of addressing her as Rachel. After you have done this a couple of times, Rebecca politely points out that her name is Rebecca, not Rachel. If, after she has drawn your attention to this, you persist in calling her Rachel, she is likely to begin to feel annoyed, and she might repeat the request to call her Rebecca. If you ignore her request a second or third time, then - provided that she has no reason to believe you have failed to understand her requests, nor that you are incapable of easily complying with them - she is likely to eventually view your behaviour as offensive. What started out as merely a dispreferred (by Rebecca) way of speaking, then, becomes offensive.

How does this happen? Well, the first time you call Rebecca Rachel, Rebecca takes you to have made an innocent and regrettably common mistake, and she assumes you meant no harm. When you continue to call her Rachel even after she has reminded you of her name, she concludes that you are being unreasonably inconsiderate of her wishes. And when you persist in calling her Rachel even after she has pointed out several times that this is not her name, it is difficult for her to avoid the conclusion that you are deliberately using an inappropriate form of address in order to upset her. Having started out assuming that you meant no harm, she comes to view your attitude towards her as hostile. And, indeed, it is hard to see how she could be mistaken.

In this example, we do not find an explanation for the offensiveness of the dispreferred expression in the expression itself. There is nothing whatsoever that is offensive about the name Rachel. Rather, the expression grows to be offensive after it has filtered through a chain of inferences that speaker and audience make about each other and about each other's inferences. In essence: you know that Rebecca's name is not Rachel, and you know that she dislikes being called Rachel, yet you nevertheless continue to call her Rachel; Rebecca knows that you know all this, and concludes from your behaviour in light of this knowledge that you are hostile towards her; you, in turn, recognise all this yet persist in calling her Rachel; Rebecca sees that you do this and so takes offence. Let's call this way in which the offensiveness of dispreferred behaviour arises from these sorts of inferences between speaker and audience offence escalation.

Offence escalation promises to explain how swearing came to be viewed as offensive. The story begins with certain forms of speech being dispreferred. Once these preferences are established within a community of speakers, people's knowledge that some expressions are to be avoided inevitably leads them to infer that if they do use a dispreferred expression, they will likely cause discomfort in their listener. And this makes using the dispreferred expression an even greater transgression: it is one thing unwittingly to use a disliked expression; quite another to use a disliked expression knowing that it is disliked, especially if our audience knows that we know that the expression is disliked. In the latter case, but not necessarily in the former, our audience has good reason to doubt our goodwill towards them; consequently, they are offended.

We need to add something to this offence escalation story to explain how words become swear words. As I have outlined it, offence escalation enables any word to become offensive, at least to someone, provided that it involves a word that the listener dislikes. As we see from the Rebecca/Rachel example, even a perfectly respectable name can become offensive to someone when used in a certain way. However, swear words are not merely words that are disliked, and which have subsequently grown to be offensive through a process of offence escalation. After all, 'Rachel' is not a swear word, even when used as described above. In addition to being dispreferred, swear words also share certain features in common, such as their focus on taboo topics like sex and defecation. They also, as we have noted, sound a certain way. Offence escalation does not explain why it is the taboo words with a particular sound, rather than other sorts of words, that get to be swear words.

The 'quick and harsh' sound of swear words plausibly adds drama to the gleeful thrill of taboo-breaking

In fact, that swear words are taboo-focused fits neatly into the offence escalation story. For a speaker to get the offence escalation process started, she needs to use an expression that she knows her listener will dislike. How can she do this? Well, if she knows her listener well enough to have a good sense of what sort of utterances he will dislike, then her job is easy, and she is well on her way to being able to offend him. For example, if her listener is sensitive about losing his hair, she can call him 'baldy'. But what if the speaker knows nothing about the listener's preferences? Or, what if the speaker is addressing multiple people with various preferences? Can she cause offence in these circumstances? The existence of taboos means that the answer is yes.

Provided that speaker and audience recognise the same taboos - which is likely if they belong to the same culture and speak the same language - the speaker knows something about which expressions her audience will probably dislike. She knows that her audience will likely find commonly dispreferred ways of referring to taboos unpleasant. And her audience will know that she knows that they will find such references unpleasant. This enables the offence escalation process to get off the ground. Moreover, it enables it to occur on a much larger scale, and much faster, than in the Rebecca/Rachel example described above: since taboo-related preferences are (and are known to be) widespread within a culture, one can annoy a great many people at once with a single taboo reference. And, unlike in the Rebecca/Rachel case, one's audience does not need to point out that a given (taboo) expression is inappropriate, since everyone will take the speaker to understand this already.

The existence of widely recognised taboos, then, offers a fast-track route for certain expressions to become widely offensive. It also provides a certain motivation for this to happen: breaking widely recognised taboos can (unlike calling people by the wrong name) be thrilling. Shocking people can sometimes be fun. Perhaps this helps explain why swear words tend to sound a certain way: the 'quick and harsh' sound of swear words may not alone be enough to account for their offensiveness, but it plausibly adds drama to the gleeful thrill of taboo-breaking, so it should not be surprising that it is the fierce-sounding references to taboos that are singled out to become swear words.

However, swear words are more than words that are universally offensive within a given culture. Slurs, too, fit this description. It seems plausible that slurs, like swears, grow to be offensive through a process of offence escalation, yet they differ from swears in that they express contempt of a given group. Why is it that some widely dispreferred words develop into swear words whilst others develop into slurs?

I think that the answer lies in what the use of the dispreferred words is taken by speaker and audience to convey. That 'fuck' grows to be an offensive swear word can be attributed to the fact that the fuck-exclaiming speaker's audience takes the speaker to be inconsiderate of their dislike of the word. That 'nigger' grows to be an offensive slur can be attributed to something a little different: to the audience's recognition that the speaker aims, through the use of this dispreferred word, to convey her contempt of black people. We might also add - as philosophers who write about slurs sometimes do - that by using a slur, a speaker attempts to make her audience complicit in her contempt, by signalling that she believes herself to be among people who share her contempt. This, too, is offensive to an audience who does not share this contempt, and is insulted to be taken to do so. We can view the process of offence escalation as similar in the case of both swears and slurs - both involve the speaker's and audience's shared knowledge that the word is dispreferred - but whereas in the case of swears, the offence arises merely from the knowledge that the word is dispreferred (and therefore the speaker is inconsiderate in choosing to use it), in the case of slurs the offence arises also from the knowledge that the speaker aims to communicate to her audience a contemptuous attitude towards a certain group, and perhaps also an assumption that her audience shares this attitude.

Swearing, then, is as offensive as it is not because of some magic ingredient possessed by swear words but lacked by other words, but because when we swear, our audience knows that we do so in the knowledge that they will find it offensive. This is why context is important: there are some contexts in which we know we will not cause offence by swearing, and when we swear in such contexts our audience's knowledge that we did so without expecting or intending to offend helps ensure that we do not offend. This explains why we are more tolerant of swearing by non-fluent speakers of our language, such as young children and non-native speakers, than we are of swearing by competent speakers. When non-fluent speakers swear, often we do not suspect them of doing so knowing that their words are offensive. Consequently, we are less likely to be offended.

You would find my refusal to thank you for your good turn rude, but you would probably not deem it morally suspect

Offence escalation helps explain why some swear words are more offensive than others; for example, why 'cunt' is more offensive than 'shit'. Initially, 'cunt' is more strongly disliked than 'shit'. Anyone who realises this, and who is taken by their audience to realise this, commits a greater transgression by saying 'cunt' than by saying 'shit'. And that we know that we commit a greater transgression by saying 'cunt' than by saying 'shit' itself magnifies the offensiveness of 'cunt' relative to 'shit'. The stronger the norms against using a particular expression, the greater the offensiveness of using that expression. In turn, the greater the offensiveness of a particular expression, the stronger the norms are against using that expression. Swearing's offensiveness feeds itself.

What does this tell us about whether or not swearing is morally wrong? It is helpful, once again, to compare swearing to etiquette breaches. Since it's preferable not to upset people where we can easily avoid doing so, we have some reason not to swear in contexts where it is likely to offend. The same holds for etiquette breaches. Even so, in most cases, we tend not to view breaches of etiquette as immoral, even where it causes offence. You would find my refusal to thank you for your good turn rude, but you would probably not deem it morally suspect. You would make a similar judgment were I to swear in the course of a polite conversation.

This is not to say that swearing, or breaching etiquette in some other way, is never immoral. We can imagine situations where breaching etiquette - by swearing inappropriately, addressing someone in an over-familiar way, refusing to adhere to a dress code, failing to say 'please' and 'thank you', and so on - would cause upset, and we can imagine situations where we might deem it morally wrong. Such situations might involve breaching etiquette with the intention to belittle, distress, harass, intimidate, provoke, and so on. But most cases of etiquette breach - including most cases of swearing - are not like this. With this in mind, some of our efforts to punish and prevent swearing - such as arrest under the Public Order Act - seem overly draconian. Swearing is often objectionable, but rarely immoral.

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Where does swearing get its power - and how should we use it? | Aeon Essays

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What makes swear words so offensive? It's not their meaning or even their sound. Is language itself a red herring here?

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A nice piece looking at linguistic trends with a coupe of examples.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-04/teenage-girls-linguistics/104160082

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Specifically what the coach says to Trew before her run, demonstrates age and TikTok influence

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Specifically what the coach says to Trew before her run, demonstrates age and TikTok influence

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Arisa Trew charmed the nation with her joyous nonchalance after snatching Olympic gold in skateboarding with a dazzling display that included a McTwist 540, a body variable 540 and a noseblunt revert that judges not only understood but awarded a combined score of 93.18.

"When I saw the score, I was, like, what? That's crazy," Trew said afterwards. Indeed.

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Why the world should fear skateboarding's smiling assassin

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Arisa Trew - Australia's youngest-ever Olympic gold medalist - is the product of an elite training program that mixes three hours of school a day with a lot of backside airs.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/23/kamala-harris-charli-xcx-brat

How is the adjective "brat" used in this article? Any more examples of usage that fit an Australian context?

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Some nice self deprivation here with praise for other nations and putting down the Aussie athletes. Note especially the way he does so with the types of insults employed by Aussies

https://www.news.com.au/sport/olympics/what-is-this-australias-paris-olympics-opening-ceremony-outfit-torched/news-story/f184c81393f869fabc28ad823b75cfb1

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Katy Perry leans into Aussie identity to build rapport with fans

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Katy Perry leans into Aussie identity to build rapport with fans

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"I'm so excited to be back in Australia and back at the mighty MCG to perform in front of 100,000 of the best and loudest fans in the world at this year’s Toyota AFL Grand Final. See you in September Oi Oi Oi!"

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MCG set to ROAR: Katy Perry to headline GF entertainment

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Katy Perry has been confirmed to headline the Telstra Pre-Game Entertainment at the 2024 Toyota AFL Grand Final

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Article about Heartbreak High - representation of Aboriginal English on television in 2024

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Article about Heartbreak High - representation of Aboriginal English on television in 2024

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The new season of Heartbreak High is garnering mixed reviews.

Critics are writing about the racy story lines, comparing it to other coming-of-age series about teenage relationships and sex such as Riverdale and Sex Education. Both seasons have been praised for their representation of cultural diversity - but I think the reviews are missing the real cultural influence of the show.

In this new season, the representation of culturally diverse characters on the grounds of Hartley High is " banal multiculturalism ". While season one looked closely at the entrenched racism of institutions, season two goes beyond events and institutions to explore a multifaceted, everyday reality.

In exploring this banal multiculturalism, the show gets closer to showing us everyday Australia.

Full young lives

What Heartbreak High excels at, especially in this second take, is in delving deeper into the complexity of the characters, many of whom hail from under-represented and misrepresented social groups.

In the first season, the police attack Indigenous character Malakai (Thomas Weatherall) without provocation when he is walking home after a Mardi Gras event. In another scene, Darren (James Majoos), who is mixed-race, is warned by his father about hiding goods stolen by his white boyfriend as the police were more likely to suspect him of the crime.

Season two does not have these explicit references to race-based political events or racist institutions. Here, backstories and character arcs help us see the everyday aspects of being a multicultural or First Nations young person.

Unlike in season one, this complexity does not render them simply as victims of a brutal system, but as having agency to heal themselves and represent others like them.

Netflix

Amerie (Ayesha Madon) is sometimes unlikeable due to her prior popular girl narcissism in season one. In the new season, she grows into more courage and accountability as she runs for school captain and rescues a fellow student from a school fire, despite the fact he had been conspiring against her the whole term.

Sasha (Gemma Chua-Tran) lives her life with an unapologetic queerness and somewhat imperfect vegan politics. Her Asian-ness only comes to light in one scene where she talks about going to a Chinese restaurant to eat a meat dish. Her overall persona is more "social justice warrior" than representative of a single ethnic group.

Missy (Arrernte actor Sherry Lee-Watson) is a feisty teenager. In a memorable scene where the school captain candidates are headed to a formal event to raise funds for their campaigns, Missy coolly gets rid of her chewing gum by pasting it on the portrait of King Charles II adorning the venue's corridor.

In not framing these characters as solely defined by their racialised identity - but still conscious of living in a racist society - Heartbreak High gives them new agency. First Nations lingua franca (such as "deadly" and "yarn") are peppered throughout the season and not explained for global viewers.

This is what I mean by banal multiculturalism: the use of this language is integrated as normal and everyday. This is powerful for communities who have often been positioned as needing translation. Here, they are not so much integrated as centred and normalised.

Towards an aspirational multiculturalism

Race-based stereotyping is still a reality in Australian schools. This new season of Heartbreak High helps us aspire to a multicultural future in which young people can transcend ethnic boxes.

The season certainly has its flaws and unrealistic plots. However, it manifests what I have called " aspirational multiculturalism ".

These depictions are not post-racial, but aspirational: they help us imagine a reality that is more justice-oriented than the current one. While racism exists in society, these students carve out a space in which their difference endows them with confidence and helps them to eventually express solidarity with their peers.

The new season shows us what we could be - and helps shape a more just multicultural society.

Netflix

Diverse young voices

The first season of the reboot appealed to both those who watched the series in the '90s and fresh Gen Z viewers.

The second season may not be able to retain all its older viewers, but some might persist to get another glimpse into the lives of young people and the social issues of the near future.

The coming-of-age genre transcends generations. It is no surprise representing complex culturally diverse characters is trialled in such stories.

Other recent examples on Netflix of diverse young adult content include Never Have I Ever and The Babysitter's Club (also a reboot). These shows have heralded a new generation of content creators and actors who are centring non-Anglo stories, and doing so in ways that champion culture as a part of the messy story of growing up.

Such young adult shows are inspiring for the next generation of non-white creatives, and signal a social change agenda for all generations.

A lasting legacy

Since 2016, we have seen a doubling of non-European representation on Australian television. But people with Indian, Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese ancestry are still under-represented, even as their populations in Australia are growing.

It is here I think the reboot could have a legacy beyond helping with the careers of a very talented young cast. Heartbreak High comes at a time of seemingly deep cultural divides, but also of generations of digitally exposed youth who are being more thoughtful about what media they engage with and are shaped by.

What is likely to make a lasting impact is the normalisation of diversity for this generation, setting the benchmark for other local productions.

Banal multiculturalism in screen drama is the future of television. Not just because it is proving to be successful with viewers, but also because it is the future we should shape for generations to come.

Sukhmani Khorana, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Season two of Heartbreak High makes diversity feel 'banal'. This is its strength

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Season two gives us a multifaceted, everyday reality. In exploring banal multiculturalism, the show gets closer to showing us everyday Australia.

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Would this be allowed in other cultures? What about Australian culture allows and encourages this from our pollies?

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/you-dill-the-words-too-potty-mouthed-for-parliament-and-the-ones-that-aren-t-20240704-p5jr32.html

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Informal language use in a review of Katy Perry's new song - taboos, linguistic innovation, etc.

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Informal language use in a review of Katy Perry's new song - taboos, linguistic innovation, etc.

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It's rare that a piece of art comes along that is so monumentally bad it unites almost everyone in their hatred for it, and it's even rarer for this to come from one of the world's most accomplished and beloved pop stars. But with her new, much-anticipated single Woman's World, Katy Perry has done it.

To borrow some strange and stilted words from the song itself, "She's a winner. Champion. Superhuman. Number one."

Since dropping on Friday, this supposed feminist empowerment anthem and music video have been torn apart by critics, with calling it "abysmal" and The Guardian's Laura Snapes saying "[it] made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it".

The terrible reception has led Perry to respond directly, releasing a behind-the-scenes video on her social media in which she - dressed as a sexy Rosie the Riveter - explains why specific elements are "sarcastic" and "very on the nose". But this has only fuelled the pushback with some of the most popular replies reading, "If you have to explain the joke, it's not a good one" and simply "CRINGE".

Is it really that bad?

Woman's World has many things working against it. The song itself is plodding and predictable, with lyrics that sound ripped from a 2004 tampon commercial. The opening lines - "Sexy, confident / so intelligent / she is heaven sent" - were widely mocked on TikTok well before the song's full release.

And the video is a garish and confusing spectacle that never seems quite sure of what it wants to say. Taking Perry's explanation of the opening third of the clip, she is satirising the girlboss feminism of the 2010s. Dressed as feminist icon Rosie the Riveter, Perry recreates the famous Lunch atop a Skyscraper image with models in sexy tradie wear before hammily spruiking "whiskey for women", sex toys, gua sha rollers and a can of her own non-alcoholic apéritif (released not in the 2010s, but just a few years ago).

She then gets smashed by a giant anvil - which she's explained as "a reset for me and a reset for my idea of the feminine divine" - and awakens in a chaotic new world with giant bionic legs that have to be recharged by pressing a petrol pump into her exposed butt cheek.

American YouTuber Trisha Paytas then joins her as she applies makeup in a monster truck sporting a bedazzled uterus, before finding a young woman doing a TikTok dance while wearing a t-shirt reading "FEMININE DIVINE" (official merch for this release), stealing her ring light which is in the shape of the female symbol, jumping in a helicopter and screaming "I'M KATY PERRY" in reply.

Is she criticising the young women of 2024 or trying to win them over through reinvention? Maybe the satire is just focused on the past. But is it really possible to satirise the poppy girlbossery of yore when your song is a pussy-hat pink empowerment anthem co-written with four men?

And that's without even getting on to the fact that one of those men is Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, Perry's long-term collaborator who was accused of raping and drugging fellow pop star Kesha. Gottwald has always denied the claim and the allegations led to a decade of legal action between the pair, which they settled last year. He was never criminally charged.

How Katy Perry fell out of the culture

It doesn't help Perry that this song has dropped at a particularly exciting time in pop music. Younger female artists like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX have exploded on the charts recently with more dynamic tracks that interrogate and celebrate the idea of female power in a more fun and honest way.

In the boppy and knowingly silly Femininomenon, Roan issues a rallying cry for women to demand better sex ("get it hot like Papa John"). In Girl So Confusing, and the subsequent much-lauded remix with Lorde, Charli XCX reckons with her insecurities and inevitable comparisons with other women in the industry.

In fact, Charli XCX even had a successful feminist satire this year: the music video for 360 featured "hot internet girls" including Julia Fox and Rachel Sennott lampooning themselves and the culture that valorises them.

These tracks feel like they were made for women to enjoy rather than manufactured to sell the idea of women's enjoyment.

That's not to say that Perry can't still make fun music (it used to be her speciality!) or that older women can't get back in on the game (Kylie Minogue's Padam Padam was all over dance floors last year). But the reaction to Woman's World - and her reaction in turn - shows that Perry is wildly out of step with the landscape.
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Katy Perry is back with a 'feminist' anthem. It's a train wreck

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Katy Perry's much-anticipated new single begins with the lyrics "sexy, confident, so intelligent." Unfortunately, it is none of those things.

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Wordplay with the Australian rowing team named the 'Rowsellas'

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Wordplay with the Australian rowing team named the 'Rowsellas'

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Australia's rowing team has been in the market for a nickname, but the country's sporting nomenclature is crowded.

The rowers glide across the water, but the Gliders are the women's wheelchair basketball side. The surface shimmers as the sun rises over training, but the Diamonds are for netball. The Sharks might have been apt, as they hunt their prey towards the finish line. But the men's lacrosse team got there first.

Instead, the national rowing team has formally adopted the nickname of "Rowsellas" ahead of the Paris Olympics. The decision follows a call-out for suggestions earlier this year, during which "the Yabbies" appeared to be the early favourite. However, Rowing Australia chief executive Officer Sarah Cook said ultimately the enthusiasm for the Rowsellas was overwhelming.

"Rowing has a long and distinguished history in Australia, so creating a name, identity and logo from scratch took an enormous amount of input and buy-in from people right across the sport, from administrators, coaches, the athletes and of course the fans, who submitted hundreds of ideas for the team name," she said.

Rowing Australia's social media accounts posted on Tuesday explaining the concept: "Just as rowing embodies endurance, grace and strength, the Rosella's characteristics of agility, beauty and resilience mirror the qualities inherent in the sport."

Kendall Brodie, who coxes the Australian men's eight, said taking on the new name was "pretty cool". Sarah Hawe, from the women's eight, said she hopes the Australian public will embrace it. "A lot of big sporting teams have mascots... the Dolphins, the Matildas... so for rowing to now come into that space is really exciting."

The Paris Games will see the Olympic debut of another Australian sporting nickname, the Gangurrus. The Australian women's basketball 3x3 team - which qualified for the Olympics for the first time this year - adopted the moniker alongside their male counterparts during the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Unlike the gender-based identities of the Boomers and Opals in the five-on-five form of basketball, the Gangurrus represent both the men's and women's teams. Anneli Maley said her team's name - taken from the Guugu Yimithirr word for the eastern grey kangaroo - was developed by the coaches and players themselves. "It's important that we all stick under the same banner and also have that support from our male counterparts," she said last week.

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Paralympic rower and world champion in the PR3 mixed double scull, Nikki Ayers, said she was proud to wear the "Rowsella" insignia and be part of the cohort of athletes "who can set the standard and culture for the name and build that genuine meaning and history".

Some sporting nicknames names - like the Wallabies, Matildas and Hockeyroos - have been widely embraced and established. Others - like surfing's Irukandjis or men's netball team the Kelpies - have only recently been adopted and are still finding traction. Not all will stick.

The Australian athletics team launched its nickname "the Flame" for the Berlin World Championships in 2009. "We firmly believe the Australian Flame is a strong cultural and commercial platform that will benefit the sport for many years to come," the Athletics Australia annual report said at the time. The Flame is no longer formally in use.

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Australian sporting tradition continues as Olympic rowing team given 'pretty cool' name

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The France-bound team has formally adopted the nickname of 'Rowsellas' ahead of the Paris Games

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Swearing and offense - when does language cross the boundary?

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Swearing and offense - when does language cross the boundary?

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In the Australian context, the 'n word' is seen as offensive regardless of how it is used - check out the story here, with this being a contemporary example (legal ruling was only this month!)

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A public servant who was stood down for using a racist slur at the pub with workmates has failed to have the decision overturned after arguing it was "just a word" that was even used as a greeting by young people.

Bryce Waite, 61, an agriculture officer with the Queensland Department of Environment and Science's reef compliance and regulation division, was stood down after being accused of making the racist comment to a colleague during a work dinner at the Oxford Hotel in Rockhampton on February 22, 2023.

The statement included the words "my white n****r".

The 30-year public service veteran and former police officer had been debating the racist slur with another colleague when a young, Indigenous female co-worker overhead his use of the word and became upset.

When challenged he said to the woman, "What, it's just a word, n****r."

He apologised the next day to the woman, telling her "sorry you felt offended".

The woman made a formal complaint and Mr Waite was suspended the following month.

A disciplinary probe substantiated the allegation "on the balance of probabilities" and found that he had breached the public service standard of conduct relating to "inappropriate or improper conduct in a private capacity that reflects seriously and adversely on the public sector entity in which the employee is employed".

"You do not deny that the offensive and racist term was used, and I reject any claim that a reasonable person could contemplate that the term can be used without it causing offence," his manager wrote in the decision.

Mr Waite appealed the suspension with the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission (QIRC), which earlier this month upheld department's disciplinary decision.

According to the judgement published on June 11, Mr Waite argued he was not aware that the complainant identified as Indigenous.

He contended that the incident occurred while he was off-duty and not wearing any clothing identifying him as a departmental employee, and therefore that it was "unfair and unreasonable" to claim the conduct "reflected seriously and adversely upon the department".

Mr Waite, who had no previous disciplinary or serious performance history, questioned why there could not be a less severe penalty than termination such as a financial or pay increment penalty.

He noted he had maintained a dedicated and professional career with the Queensland public service as well as Queensland and Victorian state and local governments, and was a recipient of both the Victoria Police Service Medal and National Service Medal.

"I contend that I did apologise to [the complainant] and I do hold remorse as I never intended to offend or upset her," he said.

"I hold no ill will towards my colleagues and am seeking to maintain a professional working relationship with them all. I contend that the chief executive has unreasonably concluded that termination of my employment is appropriate in the circumstances."

He had argued in his original response to the probe that the "context in which he used the term was that his daughter and her friends used the term as a greeting", the judgement stated.

But Commissioner Jacqueline Power found that the department "reasonably determined that this context ignores the social and historical context of the term"

"It is not 'just a word'," Commissioner Power said.

"It is described as a racial slur, and its origins relate to African slaves on United States farms, human beings sold as property with no rights."

She found the fact that Mr Waite was unaware that the woman identified as Indigenous "did not change the offensive nature of the term".

"This was a reasonable conclusion, as the term is offensive regardless of the race of the person to whom it is directed," she said.

Commissioner Power rejected Mr Waite's argument that it was the woman's choice to join the conversation, saying he was "once again, blaming the complainant for being offended - as if believing that if the conversation had remained only between [Mr Waite and the other person], no one could have taken offence".

Mr Waite suggested that previous employers had tolerated use of the racist slur as a "coping mechanism" and "stress relief" and that the team "banded together to disempower the term".

But Commissioner Power said this was an "appalling reflection on that team" and "simply demonstrated that casual racism in that team was an acceptable, everyday occurrence", adding it showed he failed to "understand the gravity of the term".

Mr Waite attempted to argue that as a Jewish person, he had no problem being called "a Jew". Commissioner Power also rejected this argument, saying calling someone a Jew "is not anti-Semitic".

"It is the correct term for someone of the Jewish faith," she said. "It is a result of a person's religion. There are many derogatory terms for a person of the Jewish faith that they may not accept quite as readily."

She found that Mr Waite being disciplined for his behaviour was "fair and reasonable".

He has now been asked to show cause as to why he shouldn't lose his job.

Mr Waite is not able to comment until the matter is finalised.

His partner told The Daily Mail on Friday the father-of-two thinks the situation is unfair, but that he now knows he should not use the term at all.

A spokesman for the Department of Environment and Science said, "We are unable to comment on employee matters. Racism is not tolerated in our workplace and any instances will be dealt with appropriately."

Read related topics: Brisbane

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'My white n****r': Queensland public servant stood down for using racist slur at pub with workmates

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A public servant who was stood down for using a racist slur at the pub with workmates has failed to have the decision overturned after arguing it was "just a word" that was even used as a greeting by young people.

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Check out the Australianisms - how did this reflect Australian identity and values?

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Pauline Pantsdown and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson (Images: YouTube/AAP)

The man who sparked legal action from Pauline Hanson over his parody of her says the One Nation leader is "wanting it both ways" after she was slapped with a concerns notice over her satirical cartoon of Robert Irwin.

Simon Hunt is a satirist better known as his drag persona Pauline Pantsdown. As Pantsdown (which he legally changed his name to at one point), he produced the songs "Backdoor Man" and "I Don't Like It", both comedic parodies of Hanson that used samples of Hanson's voice to parody and critique her policies on immigration and welfare.

"Backdoor Man" included lyrics such as "I'm a backdoor man for the Ku Klux Klan, with very horrendous plans" and "I'm homosexual. I'm very proud of it". The songs became a hit on the ABC, with "Backdoor Man" landing at number five on the 1997 Triple J Hottest 100. "I Don't Like It" peaked at 10 on the ARIA charts during the 1998 federal election, when Hunt ran as a Senate candidate in New South Wales.

In 1998, Hanson successfully sought an injunction to stop the ABC from playing "Backdoor Man".

Hunt said of the Robert Irwin cartoon saga and Hanson's defamation claim that she would "have to argue exactly the opposite of what she argued in my case", and that it was an example of "Pauline wanting it both ways".

Mehreen Faruqi's case against Pauline Hanson is about racial discrimination, not defamation. There's a big difference

Read More

Hunt said that the saga reminded him of a speech Hanson gave in 2018 in which she claimed she "hadn't flip-flopped" on the issue of company tax cuts, but had simply "said no originally, then said yes, then said no, and ... stuck to it".

In Hanson's original statement of claim, provided by Hunt to Crikey, she claimed that the song made several imputations, including that she "engages in unnatural sexual practices including anal sex with the Ku Klux Klan".

Hanson claimed "damage to her political image" as one of the impacts the song had on her.

It closely mirrors what is happening 26 years later, as Hanson sits on the receiving end of a defamation threat over comedic representations of others.

Robert, the 20-year-old son of Australian wildlife conservation icon Steve Irwin, has threatened Hanson with legal action over the latest episode of her Please Explain cartoon series, which often targets her political rivals.

The episode featured a portrayal of Robert Irwin, who has taken over his late father's post as the face of Australia Zoo, saying that the "Queensland government has given us a disgusting amount of money to show you the state of Queensland", before sarcastically touring a cartoon version of Queensland riddled with social and political problems.

Irwin's lawyer Zoe Naylor sent a concerns notice to the directors of the production company responsible for the video, asking for the video to be taken down "immediately" and threatening legal action.

"We are writing to inform you that your actions constitute defamation and involve the unauthorised and deceptive use of our client's image", the letter said.

It also claims the cartoon "may be an attempt to pass yourself or [the] party as currently being affiliated or otherwise authorised by us, which you are not", and that it "tarnished our client's reputation".

Hanson's chief of staff James Ashby is reported to have told Irwin to "lighten up", saying that "[his] dad would've seen the funny side of it".

Steve Irwin died in 2006, when Robert was three years old, after being stung by a stingray while filming a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef.

Despite her legal history with satire and defamation, Hanson, through a letter written by her lawyers in response to Irwin's concerns notice, has refused to take down the video, claiming it "does not convey a representation or pass off any association of affiliation with [Irwin]" and "does not defame [Irwin]".

In the cartoon, Irwin's cartoon parody, alongside his "best mate Bluey", goes on to tour Queensland and has a number of interactions mocking the state. He is yelled at by a portrayed angry Native Title owner that wants him to get off the beach, said to be for "whitefellas only".

"Oh no, Bluey! Racial division!"

Irwin's cartoon then goes on to look at what he presumes to be a lineup for a ride at Movie World, only to be told it was "an inspection for a one-bedder in Rockhampton", as well as a wind farm in the rainforest that blows a wedge-tailed eagle to smithereens.

Irwin's Land Cruiser gets stolen by "juvenile delinquents", only for Irwin to sarcastically turn to the recently announced policy of 50c public transport fares, which he says "doesn't help us folks out here in the country at all".
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Simon Hunt ran for the Senate in Queensland in 1998. He in fact ran in New South Wales.

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'Opposite of what she argued in my case': Pauline Pantsdown says Hanson's Irwin defamation response hypocritical

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Pauline Pantsdown, whom Pauline Hanson legally pursued over a parody, says she wants 'it both ways' regarding her Irwin concerns notice.

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https://www.starobserver.com.au/news/rugby-league-homophobic-slur-tattoo/231654

How does the response to the tattoo indicate something about Australian values? Does this player's values seem in contrast or complimentary to Australian attitudes towards masculinity?

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Banning of same-sex protrayals in picture books

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Banning of same-sex protrayals in picture books

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Of particular note is the language used by each side of the debate and whatthe author of the article puts in quotation marks - a good one to add to your example banks!

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A Western Sydney councillor has doubled down on Cumberland's blanket ban on same-sex parenting books from local libraries despite the policy breaching the state's library act and possibly contravening anti-discrimination laws.

At a meeting last week, former mayor and current councillor Steve Christou successfully passed the amendment that the council take "immediate action" to "rid" same-sex parent books and materials from its eight council-run libraries.

During the meeting, Christou brandished a book he alleged had received "really disturbing" constituent complaints, saying parents were "distraught" to see the book, Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig, displayed on a shelf in the children's section of the library.

He has since confirmed publicly he has not read the book which explores the experience of having two mums or two dads and features two men and a young child on the front cover.

Christou told Guardian Australia it was "very disgraceful" the state government was threatening to pull funding from the shire, adding Cumberland was one of the most "socially disadvantaged communities in New South Wales".

"They paid to paint buses for Mardi Gras but because a democratically elected council makes a decision in the interest they feel is representing the views of their community we're now being threatened," he said.

"I'm urging all residents to contact their four Labor state MPs saying 'we expect you to fight for us and defend us'."

Sydney council bans same-sex parenting books from libraries - video

Christou claimed the feedback he had received from his community was "overwhelmingly in support" of the ban.

A petition to rescind the ban, started by local resident Caroline Staples, has received almost 10,000 signatures in less than 24 hours. The petition, hosted by Equality Australia, will be presented to council next week.

In February, Cumberland council passed a motion in front of a 300-strong crowd banning drag queen storytime events, in a move seconded by Christou and critiqued by the current mayor.

"I'm committed to upholding the view of residents ... this isn't the end of the matter. We'll see where it lands," Christou said.

New South Wales arts minister John Graham on Wednesday wrote to the council advising it the ban contravened the state's laws that set out guidelines for freedom of access to information from libraries.

In the letter, seen by Guardian Australia, Graham noted libraries in Cumberland received $743,130 in government funding last year and asked that the council reconsider the ban "with haste".

After sending the letter, Graham said the government was "examining the consequences" the decision may have for the council continuing to receive library funding from the state government.

"The more time local councillors spend acting as self-appointed censors, the less time they have to focus on services people really need, like their bins being picked up and potholes filled," he said.

The motion passed 6-5 with the backing of Labor councillor Mohamad Hussein, who broke ranks with his party to vote in favour of the ban in a move condemned by NSW Labor minister Rose Jackson.

Hussein said he stood by his decision which was made in line with his religious beliefs and "not targeted at anyone or groups".

"I will not be comprising those beliefs," he said.

Other local residents have come out in swinging opposition, including award-winning poet Omar Sakr.

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"I cannot wait to vote them [the supporting councillors] out," he posted on X.

Staples, who moved to Lidcombe with her husband in 1985 and has raised a "rainbow family" in the area, said the ban made her "terrified" for the safety of LGBTQ+ community members.

"I've cried a few times because I don't know if I can bring my grandchildren to this library when it says they don't exist," she said. "I fear for families living here."

Staples said she backed threats from NSW Labor for council funding to be cut - adding "public money has to be accountable".

She said Christou's comments that the area had conservative beliefs and "wasn't Marrickville or Newtown" didn't represent her community but represented "some people and their fears".

"Councillors have characterised my community in a way I haven't experienced - a stereotype of western Sydney.

"I've walked these streets, been on the sidelines of football matches, had children educated here."

Greystanes resident Tori-Alice Girdhage said she and her wife and other LGBTQ+ parents in the area were "outraged" by the council's decision.

"I'd spent the morning with my six-month-old and my three-year-old daughter at Wentworthville Library, so I was utterly devastated, to be honest," she said.

"I can't fathom how this has happened because it's just going like 200 steps backwards ... [Christou's] religious and personal beliefs don't belong in government funded public libraries."

Darcy Byrne, the mayor of the Inner West, which encompasses Marrickville and Newtown, said accusations from Christou were "pathetic".

"Banning books is something we would expect to see in Putin's Russia, not modern, inclusive Sydney," he said.

Bryne said the Inner West council had been targeted in recent months by people "seeking to disrupt and cancel a range of our LGBTIQIA+ events including drag story times events".

"We will not back down in the face of intimidation from such a small minority or bigoted reactionaries."

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Western Sydney councillor doubles down on same-sex parent book ban as residents express outrage over move

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Steve Christou claims ban has 'overwhelming' community support despite petition opposing the ban gaining almost 10,000 signatures in less than 24 hours

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Neologism - slop

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Spam, junk … slop? The latest wave of AI behind the ‘zombie internet’

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Tech experts hope new term for carelessly automated AI webpages and images can illuminate its damaging impact

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Among other things, the author considers the impact of careless lexical choices on deaf and hard of hearing people in light of recent medical developments in the UK

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As someone who has been hard of hearing since I was a teenager, I read with great interest about the case of Opal Sandy - the 18-month-old British toddler who has recently had her hearing "restored" in a pioneering medical trial.

Opal was born with auditory neuropathy, which is caused by the disruption of nerve impulses travelling from the inner ear to the brain, and which left her completely deaf. But after taking part in what is being heralded as a "groundbreaking" gene therapy trial at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, she can now hear almost perfectly.

It's fantastic news that this little girl can now hear. She will no longer have to go through the negative situations that people with hearing loss often face. She won't experience being self-conscious about her hearing, as I did as an adolescent, nor the difficulties of meeting new people, such as having to ask them to repeat themselves again and again. She won't miss out on job progression because of her hearing loss. What is often required to get on in a company - overt participation in meetings, receiving verbal instructions and engaging with clients - are all affected by hearing loss. The impact that this will have on her life is tremendous.

Opal's case is something to be celebrated. But it doesn't have the profound ramifications for all deaf people that some hearing people might assume. It's important to note that every case is different, and hers is very specific. This treatment is only applicable to a particular and rare type of deafness, meaning that its implications are not as widespread as some headlines might suggest.

But what might worry deaf people more is the discussion around Opal's treatment. Prof Manohar Bance, the chief investigator for the trial, has used words such as "normal" and "cure". There has been talk of deaf people being " given hope ". For some in the deaf community, words like these can be insulting. They suggest that people with hearing loss are hopelessly and aimlessly wandering through life, waiting for a magic wand that will cure them. Word choices like this make deaf people feel endangered. They don't acknowledge that deafness is not a disease or that deaf people are not abnormal - we are most often happy, successful and thriving individuals, and make up a community with a language and culture we're proud of. None of that needs to be "cured".

Hearing people may be surprised at just how many of us are already living successful lives: 12 million people, or one in five adults in the UK, have some kind of hearing loss - and they are becoming more vocal about "not saying sorry" for who they are. My great-uncle George for example, has been deaf for more than 80 years. He's lived a very fruitful life and is still one of the happiest people I've ever met. I quit wearing my hearing aids nine years agoand still live a great life full of ambition and vigour - and with a much greater understanding of the nuances of disability.

But the language used to discuss Opal's case only echoes what we often find in the press and popular culture. Quite often in films and TV, people with hearing loss are depicted as comical, lonely or eccentric; think "greased up deaf guy" from Family Guy, Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born or Bill Skarsgård in Boy Kills World. The Academy Award-winning film Coda, for example,while praised for its inclusion of deaf actors, disappointed some deaf viewers with its false stereotypes about deaf people and for focusing on the hearing characters. A Quiet Place II, the sci-fi horror film starring Emily Blunt, was similarly criticised for its emphasis on the technology - a cochlear implant - as the hero, not the person. Above all, it's the notion that technology is our saviour that offends many people with hearing loss.

The National Deaf Children's Society's position on medical and technological intervention is clear: the family and the individual should be given all the information they need to be able to make an informed choice. I wholeheartedly agree with that. But medical professionals need to consider how they conduct the conversation, too. In a 2023 survey, 43% of people with hearing loss said they had experienced negative attitudes and behaviours from medical staff in the previous 12 months. This rose to 72% of British Sign Language (BSL) users.

Despite passing an act in 2022 to recognise BSL as a language of England, Scotland and Wales, the government has been woefully uncommitted to supporting the language; last year, it admitted that 11 out of 20 government departments had provided not a single BSL translation of any public announcement, publication or press conference in the previous 10 months. And despite the work of campaigners such as Rose Ayling-Ellis and Katie Littlejohns, funding for BSL lessons remains so meagre that many parents of deaf children can't afford to learn to sign. Technology can certainly help deaf people, but it can also lead to the erasure of a community for those with hearing loss in the UK - one built on years of heritage and understanding that is rapidly being lost in an ever-evolving world.

It's important to be hopeful and to welcome medical advances. But what many deaf people really want is much simpler: it's funding for BSL classes for parents; it's a commitment from the government to allocate more resources to those with hearing loss, and it's visibility in the media and correct representation in culture -and, my personal fantasy, mandatory BSL lessons in all schools. This would encourage a lot more people with hearing loss to engage with their own community, but above all, it would cultivate a greater and more nuanced understanding of hearing loss across the nation. If the hearing world is listening, you'll find that many deaf people would rather have support than miracle cures.

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A 'miracle cure' for deafness? For people like me, here's why that isn't our dream | Oliver-James Campbell

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It's right to celebrate a groundbreaking medical trial. But what many of us really want is more support for people with hearing loss, says journalist and social media manager Oliver-James Campbell

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It's masks on for the blind cube taste test, followed by an elimination that pushes things to the pink chicken brink.

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With Lourdes's nifty way with a barbecue having rendered her immune to elimination, she gets to stand above and gloat at the peons below, fighting desperately to keep the flickering foodie flame alive.

The black-aproned amateurs enter the kitchen to find an array of one-inch cubes, such as you might see in a dystopian sci-fi film depicting a world in which the digestive process has been rendered much more efficient. There are 100 cubes, and the cooks must taste them blindfolded, which is sort of dystopian in itself. The first six to incorrectly identify a cube will go into the second-round elimination cook.

The tension is high as blindfolds are applied, final words are drafted, amateurs are asked whether they'd like a cigarette etc. Lily begins by correctly identifying a cube of banana. Sumeet follows by saying "potato" when it's actually pumpkin and honestly that's a bit embarrassing, right? A string of amateurs easily guess their cubes, until Stephen steps up and says "potato" when it's actually beetroot. How easily these people forget the first rule of MasterChef: never say potato.

The challenge has now lasted more than three days, and the amateurs have still had nothing but cubes to eat.

The next failure is Mimi, who guesses flour when the answer is oat, which seems a bit unfair. I mean, oat? Seriously? OAT? Supposed to be MasterChef, not MasterHorse. We come back to the beginning and things start to get harder. Alex doesn't know what grain she's chewing on. She thinks for several hours about it. Finally, after a series of threats, she agrees to say something. She says rice. She's right. We'll never get that time back. The great wheel of cubes turns on, until Juan says grapefruit when he should've said lemon, oh my god can you imagine? Straight away, American Josh joins him when he misidentifies tasty cheese as
parmesan - bit harsh, as he did at least guess that it was cheese.

The cubes get harder - I mean, more difficult - and the skills on display are impressive. David identifies tuna sashimi by listening to it. The challenge has now lasted more than three days, and the amateurs have still had nothing but cubes to eat. Finally, everyone's pain is ended when Lily bites eggplant and says cucumber and becomes the sixth entrant to elimination.

And so, with everyone physically and emotionally drained, the elimination cook begins. All six begin on an equal footing, even though four of them are there for failing a difficult challenge while Sumeet and Stephen are there for uncontrollably blurting out potato all over the place.

The elimination cook requires the failures to make a dish using only the ingredients that were featured in the taste test - although they don't have to cook them in cube form. The amateurs begin to despair at being forced to cook with only 100 ingredients to choose from.

Juan has decided to try to enjoy himself, which is always a mistake. He retains a cheerful countenance even when people on the balcony begin shouting puns on his name - if I were him I'd have killed over these by now. Sumeet reveals that she loves the colour of a beetroot pumpkin soup, which is good because the taste is god-awful. Meanwhile, American Josh angrily cuts a lobster in half, abandoning his culinary dreams in favour of the emotional release of animal cruelty.

Elsewhere, Stephen is preparing "Stevo's take on ravioli", the surprise twist being that uses beetroot instead of pasta in order to maximise its disgustingness. He explains his plan to Poh and Andy, who seek counselling for the trauma this causes. "Get a back-up plan," Andy advises Stephen, who enrols in an accounting course at TAFE just in case.

As the cooks sweat, Jean-Christophe and Sofia feed each other cubes and guess what they are. Sofia puckishly grabs a crayfish and puts it in Jean-Christophe's hands, which in some cultures means they are now married.

Mimi is putting pork belly in porridge, proving that sanity has officially abandoned the MasterChef kitchen. "I love your attitude," says Poh, which isn't what she said when she heard about Stevo's ravioli. Is beetroot ravioli inherently more inadvisable than pork porridge? Both of them sound like nauseating euphemisms, so it feels like favouritism.

Meanwhile, Lily has no idea whether her chicken is cooked or not, but at least if she doesn't make a good dish she will kill someone with it. Andy tells her she needs to kick it up a notch. She puts cream cheese in her mushroom sauce. It ruins the sauce. Andy chuckles darkly, his sinister plan coming to fruition. He gets to work on Phase Two, visiting Stephen to further undermine his confidence.

With time always up, Sumeet has an idea, terrifyingly enough. She decides to paint her plate, as if she doesn't have enough to do. But paint was not one of the cubes in the taste test, so she has to paint it with soup. In other words, she puts food on a plate. Amazing creativity. Meanwhile, Lily claims her mushroom sauce is delicious, and her chicken is 74, which seems a bit old, but you work with what you've got.

Tasting time arrives. The judges gird their loins. Stephen's face is grim as he realises what he's done and is crushed by guilt. Mimi serves first. Her pork porridge is good despite the obvious. "It's like a hug," says Andy, who grew up with some extremely moist, meaty hugs. Lily serves her chicken Maryland, which may not be cooked properly. "It's right on the border," says Andy, which makes it chicken Delaware, a much less satisfying dish. The chicken is undercooked and the leek is raw, which means big trouble for Lily: if only she'd called it chicken tartare she'd have got away with it.

Sumeet serves beetroot and pumpkin soup with butter-fried prawns and the judges like it for reasons unknown. American Josh serves prawn and lobster bisque. As a nasty surprise, he has a leek in his soup, but the judges overlook this faux pas and award him top marks.

Juan slings his asado Argentino, which is meat and potatoes in strange and exciting shapes. Poh reveals his secret past as a pop star. "I cannot wait to google you," says Sofia: another euphemism. Anyway, the food is not very good. "I wish there was coriander," says Andy, the first person in history to ever say this sentence.

Stephen serves his beetroot ravioli, which looks dreadful but in a twist that would be surprising if it didn't happen every single episode, is wonderful. It is the second dish in this elimination that will now be used in the propaganda campaign to convince the public that beetroot is edible.

There is no surprise in the final judging, as Lily is deemed to have erred in plating up a piping hot portion of salmonella, and thus must go home. "Sometimes playing it safe is playing with fire," says Sofia, though ironically, if Lily had played with fire her chicken might've been cooked. "I'm not sad," sobs Lily miserably, and then goes home to ponder the ineffable connection between heat and nutrition.

Tune in Wednesday night, when someone will probably make something out of beetroot again. Catch up on Ben Pobjie's previous MasterChef recaps here.

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A 'piping hot portion of salmonella' sends another MasterChef contestant packing

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It's masks on for the blind cube taste test, followed by an elimination that pushes things to the pink chicken brink.

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Morphological wordplay with affixation - can you think of other examples you do do linguistically to mark a feminist identity

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How do power and language intersect? Some nice quotes around this you can pull for essays!

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Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi has told the federal court that verbal attacks on white people in Australia are not racist because racism is "tied to power" and in this country, "the power.. is held by white people".

Faruqi is suing One Nation senator Pauline Hanson in the federal court over what Faruqi has called "the ultimate racist slur" - a social media post that told her to "pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan".

Through her lawyer, Sue Chrysanthou SC, Hanson has accused Faruqi of hypocrisy and political grandstanding in pursuing the legal action while excusing what she acknowledges were racist remarks inside her own party. Hanson accused Faruqi of making or endorsing comments condemning white people.

Faruqi was the first witness on Monday in a case that could test the constitutional validity of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which Chrysanthou argued potentially undermined the constitutionally implied right to political communication. The case is also examining what constitutes racism and whether power imbalances play a role in defining it.

Faruqi has accused Hanson of breaching section 18C, which prohibits an act that is reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person or group because of their race, colour, nationality or ethnicity.

Her complaint is based on a post Hanson made on the social media platform Twitter, now called X, in September 2022.

"I understood her words, to be the ultimate racist slur," Faruqi said under cross-examination from Hanson's lawyer, Sue Chrysanthou SC. "Implying and clearly saying that I don't belong here. So it really challenged my sense of belonging to this country."

Chrysanthou accused the Pakistani-born senator, who migrated to Australia in 1992 and later became an Australian citizen, of targeting Hanson because she was a political opponent.

"You've come here to use the witness box as a soapbox to give speeches to further your political ends," Chrysanthou put to Faruqi. The Greens senator said she had not.

"I understood this to be particularly pointed at me, that I don't have the same rights to have the same benefits that Australia offered every other citizen of this country," Faruqi said.

Chrysanthou suggested that Faruqi was a "hypocrite" who had made and endorsed racist remarks about white people.

Justice Angus Stewart challenged whether such comments about white people were automatically racist. He pointed to differing views on the allegedly abusive comments about whiteness made by Samantha Kerr, captain of Australia's Matildas football team, to a London taxi driver, as evidence there was public debate.

The Greens senator insisted remarks that her journalist son Osman Faruqi had made on social media criticising white people were not racist because racism was also about power.

"It is tied to who holds the power and who has the authority to perpetrate racism and oppress people," Faruqi said. "And in this country, the power of that is held by white people."

The federal court case centres on a Twitter exchange between the two senators on 9 September 2022, shortly after Queen Elizabeth II died. After news of the monarch's death had emerged overnight, Faruqi posted a message on Twitter at about 11.15am.

"Condolences to those who mourn the Queen," the post said. "I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples. We are reminded of the urgency of Treaty with First Nations, justice & reparations for British colonies & becoming a republic."

Just under five hours later, Hanson quoted Faruqi's tweet and posted a response.

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"Your attitude appalls and disgusts me," Hanson's post said. "When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It's clear you're not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan."

Chrysanthou told the court Faruqi had posted her original tweet on a day and at a time designed to provoke a response. Long before Hanson posted her response, she said Faruqi had already received a barrage of similarly critical responses.

Faruqi's lawyer, Saul Holt KC, suggested the words in Hanson's tweet were more likely to offend and humiliate because of who said them.

"They were spoken by Pauline Hanson, a senator of the Australian Parliament, the leader of a political party and so to use the modern term 'an influencer' - a well known long standing and prolific sire of racist things, particularly anti migrant and anti Muslim things," Holt said.

Chrysanthou suggested Hanson's tweet was only accusing Faruqi of hypocrisy.

"Senator Hanson was targeting me with racism," Faruqi replied. Earlier, Holt told the court that Hanson's wording was "just a version of the well-known anti-migrant, racist, nativist phrase 'go back to where you came from'".

Faruqi defended her original tweet, saying every MP or senator had the right to criticise Australia's institutions.

"That's how change happens for the better. And that was my reason for doing this. That's not hypocrisy."

Faruqi is asking the court to make Hanson delete the post, undertake anti-racism training at her own expense and donate $150,000 to a charity of Faruqi's choosing.

Hanson's lawyers argue her tweet falls within the Racial Discrimination Act's exemptions because she acted reasonably and her comments were made in good faith and reflected a genuine belief.

Hanson is due to give evidence on Tuesday.

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Mehreen Faruqi v Pauline Hanson: Greens senator tells court attacks on white people not racist

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Greens senator says One Nation senator made the 'ultimate racist slur' while Hanson's lawyer suggests Faruqi is a 'hypocrite'

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-22/arj-barker-melbourne-international-comedy-festival/103754516

An interesting topic and the Comedy Festival's response is some great doublespeak - so vague yet trying to appear affirming. What do you think of the language used?

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https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103731134#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17135615687545&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com

Some interesting figurative language here - what can you find?

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Just like the generations before them, Gen Z uses an extensive list of slang words.

"Bussin'," "ick," and "mid" are popular among Gen Zers.

Social media helps slang spread rapidly, but proper credit is often lost along the way.

Just like fashion, slang goes in and out of style.

Think about it: When was the last time you heard anyone say "YOLO," "da bomb," or "tubular" unironically?

Social media has made it even harder to keep up with the trends, as anyone and everyone can share and adopt others' use of language.

, a linguist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Business Insider last year, "Even though slang has always existed, the emergence of social media has created a situation where the potential for slang virality has increased."

While this can be an exciting opportunity for people to connect and bond over language, one major issue is appropriation. Many of the slang words attributed to Gen Z - defined by the Pew Research Center as anyone born between 1997 and 2012 - were created by members of marginalized communities, most notably Black and LGBTQ+ communities, which often aren't credited for their contributions.

The language is shared online in circles of people who understand its nuance, and it's later appropriated by those who don't know where it came from or fully understand how to use it. And it's easy for those who created it to see when it's being used incorrectly.

Brands or publications trying to attract attention from Gen Z, therefore, need to take care when using slang - at best, they could make a cringey mistake; at worst, they could offend people.

Gen Z values authenticity more than older generations did. Chad Kessler, who was then the global brand president at American Eagle, told BI in 2019, "Gen Z wants to support and participate in brands that they believe in and that reflect them."

He added: "They are loyal to brands that they feel understand them and reflect their values."

As slang continues to evolve daily in person and on the internet, all these words and phrases are subject to their respective ends, when they're axed from public use and deemed "uncool."

But at least for now, here are 13 slang terms Gen Z is using in 2024 and what they mean.

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13 slang words Gen Zers are using in 2024 and what they really mean

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If the phrase "she ate and left no crumbs" makes no sense to you, allow us to explain.

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https://theconversation.com/brekkies-barbies-mozzies-why-do-aussies-shorten-so-many-words-192616

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Does the word "here" have one syllable or two? Does "France" rhyme with "pants" or "aunts"?

Across Australia, linguists are revolutionising the understanding of how Aussies' voices differ from one another, fuelling new insights into what was once thought to be a monolithic accent.

Felicity Cox is one of the researchers leading this effort at Macquarie University's School of Linguistics.

"We didn't really start thinking about this wide range of variation until recently," Professor Cox says.

"What we're finding now is that Australian English is diversifying in really interesting ways."

These differences can span particular communities, regions, cultures and generations.

In a 2023 research paper, Debbie Loakes and other linguists at the University of Melbourne found the Victorian habit of pronouncing "el" and "al" the same way (eg "celery" becomes "salary") was dying out among young people in the state's north, but persisting in the south.

"What I found was in Warrnambool the sound change was advancing, so that meant that more people were merging those sounds together, whereas in Mildura only the old people were doing that," Dr Loakes says.

Three types of Aussie accents or more?

Historically, researchers have classified Australian accents as broad, general, and cultivated.

These variations are still heard today, with broad accents being the strongest (Steve Irwin), general accents the most common (Kevin Rudd) and cultivated accents the most practised and posh (Cate Blanchett).

However, recent research has moved away from this perspective.

"In the 60s, 70s and 80s there was this idea that Australian English had three varieties but they were really focusing on that mainstream Australian English," Professor Cox says.

Instead, Macquarie University's Department of Linguistics lists ethnocultural, mainstream and Aboriginal Australian English as the three primary subgroups of the Australian accent today.

Dr Loakes says linguists used to think younger Australians were trending away from the broad and cultivated accents toward a more general voice, but that recent work suggests the changes are more complicated.

"There are lots of sound changes going on in communities that we're not aware of and they may advance and they may not advance," she says.

The death of the ABC accent

ABC listeners may be familiar with the archetypal cadence and tone of Australia's national broadcaster, which certainly falls into the cultivated accent camp.

However, listening to archival recordings makes it clear that the "ABC accent" is far milder today than it was just a few decades ago, and many presenters actively reject it.

ABC WA presenter Andrew Collins says times have changed since he first applied for a job at the national broadcaster.

"This was in Broken Hill 17 years ago - I really struggled to get the tick because I didn't have an ABC voice," he says.

"But I snuck in and 17 years later the mould is out the window."

Collins is not alone in thinking the ABC has dropped its signature voice.

"There 100 per cent is an ABC voice but I don't feel any pressure to use it," ABC Science reporter Belinda Smith says.

"I think our voice and our accent really helps make us who we are and I always encourage ABC reporters not to do the classic news reporter voice," ABC Indigenous reporter Tom Forrest says.

Aboriginal English

The concept of Aboriginal Australians having a unique accent, or accents, has long been familiar to linguists and is the focus of much recent work.

Understanding Aboriginal accents is complicated by vast geographic, dialect and language separation.

"I've worked with Aboriginal people a lot in Mildura and Warrnambool and talked to people about what they think about their accents," Dr Loakes says.

"The way that Aboriginal English speakers use vowels is changing at a different rate and there's different changes [in different places]."

Tom Forrest, who grew up in an Aboriginal community in far north-west Australia, agrees.

"When it comes to Aboriginal communities, whether they're speaking Kriol or Aboriginal English or their own dialect, that accent definitely changes across the regions," he says.

"When I interact with Indigenous people in New South Wales we don't use the same lingo and our accents are definitely different compared to the mob back home in the Kimberley."

Fitting in

Despite not changing his voice for the ABC, Mr Forrest says he does change it to fit in elsewhere.

"Being able to change the way I talk and change my accent is really great and comes in really handy to the point that I don't even think about it," he says.

"But not everyone can do that and it absolutely is an obstacle because people can judge you on your accent.

"They may think you're less educated or not as intellectual because maybe you aren't being so articulate with the words you use."

Researchers have found similar biases at work against other ethnocultural groups speaking varieties of Australian English.

"People will play recordings and say, 'Do you think this person is employable?', 'do you think this person sounds like a nice person?' and if they don't have a mainstream Australian accent the judgements will be more negative," Dr Loakes says of the research.

"It can lead to a lot of discrimination for people."

Despite recognising that people perceive varieties of Australian English differently, linguists have shied away from classifying them as separate accents.

"It's similar to asking what's the difference between a language and a dialect - it's not an easy question to answer," Professor Cox says.

Find more local news
Browse for your location and find more local ABC News and information

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Does the way you say 'France' rhyme with 'pants' or 'aunts'? How the Australian accent is changing

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Australian voices really aren't what they used to be. Linguists and ABC presenters weigh in on the changes to Aussie voices and the death of the ABC accent.

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This article highlights a few examples of Joyce swearing this year - note how the intent and target of the swearing seems to be pivotal to the offensiveness that Campion downplaying.

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Barnaby Joyce's wife has broken her silence after her husband was found lying on a footpath mumbling into his phone after dark in Canberra.

The former deputy prime minister has declared he is ashamed and "embarrassed" after video emerged where he appears slightly tired and emotional.

The shock incident involving Mr Joyce occurred close to an apartment he owns in Braddon where the mother of his children Vikki Campion was photographed five years ago while she was pregnant.

The bizarre footage, obtained by Daily Mail Australia, records the Nationals frontbencher lying on the footpath in Canberra late at night while mumbling "dead f**king c***" into his phone.

In a statement, Mr Joyce said he was embarrassed and confirmed he had fallen off the inner-city planter box.

"I was walking back to my accommodation after Parliament rose at 10pm," he said.

"While on the phone I sat on the edge of a plant box, fell over, kept talking on the phone, and very animatedly was referring to myself for having fallen over."

His new wife Ms Campion, who confirmed he was on the phone with her at the time, said the harsh words were not directed at her.

"No I think he was calling himself one, he likes to self flagellate," she told news.com.au.

Ms Campion said she was disappointed someone filmed the incident rather than render assistance.

"I've been with Barnaby when we have found a man in the same state on the street and rather than take a video and sell it to the media, he picked the guy up and took him home, we later found out there had been problems with his medication and if he hadn't helped him back he could have been in a very bad situation," she said.

"On another occasion he picked up a hospital patient who was walking around disoriented and took him back to the hospital.

"Both of them were Canberra residents who he went out of his way to help after a sitting. It's disgusting that when he was in need they could not even check he was ok."

Ms Campion said her husband did hurt himself, but observed that like most farmers he never complained.

"He did hurt his back but he hasn't made a big deal of it," she said. "The guy who took the video witnessed him fall off the pot plant and confirmed that to the Daily Mail, and instead of checking if he was ok, whipped his phone out, took a video and kept walking. Lovely."

Mr Joyce recently hit the headlines again after he described former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull as a "sh*thead" in an ABC documentary.

The video was first obtained by Daily Mail Australia and captures Mr Joyce at 11.36pm on Wednesday night, the traditional evening where MPs get off work early to have dinner and hit the pub.

Witnesses claim the MP had been sitting on a large pot plant while chatting on the phone before he fell off and started swearing into the phone.

In the video that was recorded by a bystander, he is wearing the same blue and white tie worn during Question Time in Parliament House earlier that day.

Mr Joyce and the former Deputy Speaker Llew O'Brien were forced to stage a strategic retreat from a Canberra pub in Braddon three years ago after the pair said they were harassed by "Irish backpackers".

Mr Joyce and his friend Mr O'Brien, a former Queensland cop, deny being thrown out of the pub.

However, the pair have revealed they were forced to make a swift exit before matters escalated with a group of "loud" Irish backpackers.

"No, no, it was certainly nothing to do with me," Mr Joyce told news.com.au.

"Someone was being rude to Llew. What happened (was) there were Irish backpackers and they were being loud and I thought, 'Let's get out of here'."

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Joyce's wife's angry words after bizarre video

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Barnaby Joyce's wife has broken her silence after her husband was found lying on a footpath mumbling into his phone after dark in Canberra.

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Harkening back to Unit 2, consider how changes to the language overall may impact what is considered formal.

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Name: Correct preposition use.

Age: The quarrel is probably as old as English prepositions themselves, so about 600 years.

And what is the quarrel? "It is permissible in English for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with."

Ew, that sounds a bit awkward. Does it mean it's OK to end a sentence with a preposition? Yes.

And just remind me - it's been a while - a preposition is ...? About, to, in, at, of, upon etc. The above was a post on Instagram.

By? Yes, by can also be a preposition.

No, who was the post by? Or by whom was the post?

Argh, just tell me! Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary publisher. Someone in its social media department clearly thought they were being clever by writing the post in the form of its subject.

Got it. And good - it's what I struggle most with. Or with what you struggle most ... Actually, that's a better example, because it demonstrates how totally acceptable it is to end with a "with".

We should work in the social media team of Merriam-Webster. The post adds: "The idea that it should be avoided came from writers who were trying to align the language with Latin, but there is no reason to suggest ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong."

So it's OK to end with a preposition? It's confirmed in the FAQ section of its online dictionary: "The people who claim that a terminal preposition is wrong are clearly clinging to an idea born in the 17th century and largely abandoned by grammar and usage experts in the early 20th century."

Others disagree? "Maybe so," said one respondent on Instagram. "But it doesn't sound expressive and at times sounds like someone isn't intelligent enough to articulate themselves."

Well, I think they sound snobbish. It was probably drummed into them at school. Wrongly.

To wrongly drum in - that would be wrong, right? Grammatically, to casually split infinitives is frowned upon by some but embraced and celebrated by Trekkies since 1966 - as in "to boldly go".

Ooh, I love a grammar controversy. Got any more? A stickler might say they don't like a singular they, they also don't like no double negatives, and nor do they like an Oxford comma.

Still, you probably get less grammar sticklers these days. One probably gets. And fewer. But yeah, hopefully.

Do say: "That's what I'm talking about!"

Don't say: "It's about that that I'm talking! PS: Fancy a quickie?"

Eh? Where did that come from? Just ending with a proposition ...

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Terrible news for pedants as Merriam-Webster relaxes the rules of English

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It's fine to end a sentence with a preposition, according to a shock ruling from the American dictionary publisher. But is it OK to recklessly split infinitives?

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Great addition! Some nice variation according to gender to comply with expectations

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Great addition! Some nice variation according to gender to comply with expectations

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Please do be offended while I give two fingers to the gender swear gap | Claire Cohen

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A well-placed profanity is the perfect riposte to dated ideas of female delicacy. So hats off to sweary Olivia Colman, says journalist Claire Cohen

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Some nice linguistic innovation here with emoji

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Some nice linguistic innovation here with emoji

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Can you think of other emoji you use in this way?

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emojis 👏 are 👏 punctuation 👏 #etymology #linguistics #language #punctuation | Adam Aleksic | etymologynerd · Original audio

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emojis 👏 are 👏 punctuation 👏 #etymology #linguistics #language #punctuation. etymologynerd · Original audio

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Are you ready for it? ‘Yeah-nah’ comes back stronger – with a little help from Taylor Swift

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For Australians, it’s a love story, so baby just say “yeah-nah”.

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Check out this explanation of the prosody of influencers on social media:

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/WFhXu2feFSJboLPm/?mibextid=D5vuiz

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Unusual methods of phonation, like glottal fry or breathiness, also help retain viewers. I know I do this to some extent-my fast talking especially helps retain viewers-but at this point it feels more natural than talking normally to the camera #linguistics #accent #language #dialect | Adam Aleksic | etymologynerd · Original audio

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Unusual methods of phonation, like glottal fry or breathiness, also help retain viewers. I know I do this to some extent-my fast talking especially helps retain viewers-but at this point it feels…

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Conversion and shift of 'babygirl' from TikTok

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Conversion and shift of 'babygirl' from TikTok

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Are you using this recent TikTok crossover?

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Name: So babygirl.

Age: Still in its infancy for men (it was first sighted in 2021).

Appearance: Mainly on TikTok.

TikTok, you say? Yes, and fandom generally.

Another rigorously intellectual conversation beckons, I see. You know you love it, babygirl.

Go on then, enlighten me. What is "so babygirl"? It's a gen Z term of endearment, sort of.

Why are we talking about it now? Well, Jacob Elordi (he of Euphoria, Saltburn, extreme tallness and cheekbones fame) hosted the most recent episode of the US topical comedy show Saturday Night Live and one skit involved his co-host, Renée Rapp, and SNL cast member Bowen Yang describing him as "so babygirl", to Elordi's comic confusion.

If Elordi is babygirl, I suppose it means attractive? It's a bit more complicated than that. There is a conventional usage that does mean cute, but also slightly naive: "A man who is very cutesy in a slightly submissive way," says Rolling Stone. Other classic "so babygirl" candidates include Harry Styles and the South Korean superstar Jimin.

Isn't that a bit demeaning? Yes, but it's also a way of celebrating the softer side of these men. "It actually is being used in a positive way, like you're highlighting favourable qualities in a man," Prof Sylvia Sierra of Syracuse University told Grazia.

And is it ... sexual? It can be? There's a BDSM usage of babygirl.

So what's the other usage of "so babygirl"? Well, you know gen Z; they like to subvert a trend as soon as they invent it, meaning "so babygirl" has also been used to compliment the "miserable antihero in his 40s" you find attractive. Think Walter White from Breaking Bad, Kendall Roy from Succession or Joel (Pedro Pascal's character) from The Last of Us. I wouldn't say there is a consensus about who gets to be so babygirl, despite the SNL skit; the term seems able to accommodate layer on layer of irony and self-referential silliness.

Those gen Z scamps. They contain multitudes. It's elusive, applied to Keanu Reeves, 59, one of the blue guys from Avatar and, er, Godzilla. I've also seen it explained as having "passenger princess vibes" or being the same as "cinnamon roll".

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I'm so tired. It's almost as if the confusion is the point? Yes. There is a genre of conventionally babygirl TikTokers posting "What does that mean?" videos in response to "so babygirl" comments.

Is there anyone who can't be a babygirl? Maybe a female infant? But at this point, I'm going to say no: babygirl is whatever you want it to be.

Do say: "You're so babygirl."

Don't say: " You're so baby shark doo doo doo."

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So babygirl! It's the new gen Z term of endearment - but what does it mean?

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It means attractive, it means sexy ... it means old and miserable? The latest youthful phrase is hot off the TikTok presses and here to confuse us all

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Swearing is becoming more widely acceptable, linguistics experts claim

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Some nice quotes to pull here and pair with some of your holiday homework!

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Swearing has become more widely acceptable over the past two decades because it is increasingly used for other purposes than to insult people, linguistics experts have said.

"Fuck" and "shit", the two most commonly used swearwords in the UK, are frequently used to emphasise a point in conversation or to build social bonds, rather than with the specific intent to cause offence, according to academic researchers.

They made the comments after the BBC presenter Mishal Husain swore seven times in under a minute during an interview with the home secretary, James Cleverly.

The broadcaster questioned him on Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday about things he had recently been accused of saying, which included whether he had described a person or a place as a "shit-hole".

Dr Robbie Love, a lecturer in English Language at Aston University, Birmingham, said: "Swearing, as with all language use, is entirely context dependent and context specific. It's what you do with the word and the various functions, as far as performed, that informs the perception of how acceptable it is."

Love said research had found that people commonly swore in casual conversation to express surprise, to create humour, to show solidarity with their peers, or to abuse someone.

But Husain was not doing any of these, he said. "Rather, she's referring to the word that [Cleverly allegedly] used and asking whether he said it. In that context, I would argue that it's more likely to be considered acceptable, than if she suddenly said at the end of the story, 'Well, that was a load of shit, wasn't it?'

"The choice to say it might be part of a strategy to rattle James Cleverly, and not to euphemistically replace that term to force him to acknowledge the reality of that word. But I'm not sure if anybody would genuinely be offended by hearing that word in that context."

Love, who has published studies on swearing trends in informal conversation between the 1990s and 2010s, and the use of the F-word among British teenagers, said most swearwords were becoming less taboo due to the ways in which people were using them.

For example, the F-word was increasingly being used in generic phrases such as "oh, for fuck sake", or "what the fuck?", which had lessened its impact to offend, he added.

"If you break it down and think, if I say, 'who the fuck did that?', as opposed to 'who did that?', what does 'fuck' actually mean? It's just emphasising the general sentiment," he said.

The academic added that this use of the word was happening a lot more now than a few decades ago. "That's good evidence that the specific meaning of that word is falling away, because when people use it, they're using it in these kind of generic ways."

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Love said swearing performed other functions in casual conversation, such as forming social bonds between friends or work colleagues, where its usage signalled a degree of solidarity or social intimacy with the group.

Yehuda Baruch, a professor of management at the University of Southampton's business school, said his research with professionals such as lawyers, doctors and senior managers found swearing was used to create team cohesion, relieve stress and emphasise a point.

Baruch said swearing was also used in a calculated attempt to gain attention, for example, he believed, when the billionaire Elon Musk used the F-word in an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit.

He added: "I'm sure Mishal did it because she wanted to emphasise the point, so that everybody will listen. Forty years ago, she would never do it. But unfortunately, it is effective. This is the new language and we have to live with it."

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Swearing is becoming more widely acceptable, linguistics experts claim

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Swearwords increasingly used for emphasis and to build social bonds, rather than to insult, say academics

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Can you think of any more examples of this? OP? DM?

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Check out this site for Australian colloquialisms and the context specific grapheme "*" when telling about 5 star (or is it only 5?) reviews.

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Yarn’n - Deadly Dunny Paper Made in Australia

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Australian made toilet tissue. First Nations owned, 100% recycled loo roll that brings culture, learning and joy to bathrooms across our island home. Let’s all share a yarn to carry on our journey of generational change together. Quality made, soft as a cloud tissue.

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squeamishness about meat encoded into English language

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It was in 2010, in a shared kitchen at Cambridge University, that I first came to harbor a secret disdain for the semantic squeamishness of English-speaking meat-eaters. I was preparing raw chicken for dinner when a hallmate walked in. He, a sturdy, English-born student of Economics, stopped at the sight of me, and I had the distinct impression of having, once again, done something wrong.

I was, that year, an American student studying abroad at one of the most decorated institutions in the world, and made aware of it. I was intimidated by formal robes, butlers in the dining hall, cleaners in the dorm rooms, lawns one was forbidden to walk across unless invited by faculty, 800-year-old libraries, a new friend who, one night, drunkenly called the elderly porter a "fucking prole." I believe I laughed. Everyone else did. Later, I learned that "prole" was short for "proletariat," and the drunken friend's family owned a named estate.

I was constantly excusing myself that year, or pretending to understand references, or swallowing dumb questions, or smiling at the joke that I, an American, couldn't pronounce my own name. At formal dinners for which students wore black robes beneath the vaulted ceiling like extras from Harry Potter, I kept knocking into servers who set down each plated course. Food was always served over the left shoulder, but how was I to know? Servers were not the only ones to whom I mumbled apologies. That had begun at British immigration, when an officer at Heathrow looked meaningfully at my disorganized papers and said, "Shouldn't a Cambridge student know better?" The implication was that I was no Cambridge student. "I could refuse to let you in," he said, the first of many unamusing jokes I laughed at.

"Chicken" has transcended food to achieve a kind of inert neutrality.

On this particular evening in 2010, in that still-life comprising me, my chicken, and my hallmate, it was the hallmate who turned and walked out. Minutes later, a second hallmate - they were all English boys - entered, paled, and backed out stammering, ceding the kitchen to me.

In England, in modern English, a living cow arrives on the plate as "beef," a calf as "veal," a sheep as "mutton," and a pig is transmuted into "pork," which is also called, prettily, the other white meat. The names of the living animals have Anglo roots, whereas the names of the ingredients came from the French - a trademark of Norman conquerors who, in the 11th century, hoped to subjugate the "savage" Natives of the British Isles. "Beef," "veal," and "pork" were words of the ruling class, imbued with sophistication and cultural superiority, far removed from living animals with their guts and blood and shit. These words, it occurred to me in 2010, were a form of hypocrisy.

That "chicken" remains "chicken" has its basis in constructed hierarchies, too. Chickens were peasant food in 11th-century England. Nowadays, to say something "tastes like chicken" is to promise no gaminess or oddness, no funk or distinction, no whiff of barnyard animal. "Chicken" has transcended food to achieve a kind of inert neutrality. Most of my Cambridge hallmates cooked chicken in our shared kitchen. They preferred breasts and tenderloins, often shortened to "tenders." Neat digits of meat, tenders arrived precut and slid bloodlessly from plastic trays, the violence of their severing from the "loin" - an uncomfortably human body part - having been done offstage.

In Mandarin, a pig is a pig is a pig, whether oinking or braised; and chickens, ideally, come with feet and head intact. In some cases, a second character may be appended to the name of the animal, so that 猪 (zhū) is referred to as 猪肉 (zhū roù). 肉 (roù) means "meat" or "flesh." Rather than hide the animal, 肉 draws attention to the fact that food is carved from a living creature - or added to one. 肉 is also used by Chinese relatives to comment on weight gain. Literally: You have grown (human) meat.

I lost weight my first few months at Cambridge, in part because my meals were no longer subsidized. Back at my American university, my need-based scholarship had covered on-campus food, as well as tuition and housing; in Cambridge, I faced the unpleasant discovery that food was not considered a financial need. Each dish of pudding or squash I placed on my dining hall tray increased my credit card debt. The price-to-calorie ratio of each bite I took in that gorgeous, centuries-old dining hall was sharper than my own hunger. It came to feel of a piece: that an empire unwilling to connect a piece of meat to the living animal from which it came would also refuse to connect the education of a mind to the needs of a body; would serve, with exemplary manners, each course over my left shoulder while ignoring, on the other side, centuries of colonial hypocrisies at home and abroad.

Some months into my time at Cambridge, I quit the dining hall and began to cook my own food, developing a sturdy love for smoked mackerel, red Leicester, and anything under the Sainsbury's Basics brand. By the time my hallmates walked into the kitchen in 2010, I didn't have my hands on just any chicken; I had my hands in one, because I was spatchcocking it.

Spatchcocking is a preparation rumored to come from the Irish phrase "dispatch the cock," such that the death of the bird is inseverable from its cooking. My technique: Crunch a knife down either side of the chicken's spine in order to remove it. Push on the breast till flesh and cartilage pancake into an even flatness. Keep the scraps. A spatchcocked chicken roasts in 45 minutes and costs less than the equivalent number of pre-cleaned breasts, wings, thighs, drumsticks. I found beauty in the economy of the technique: the way spine became stock and giblets gravy, the definitive crunch of the breastbone that yielded, only with effort, to the weight of my whole body. It feels more honest: I feel it. Nowadays, at a certain type of Chinese restaurant in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco or in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I still thrill at an old, laminated menu that offers "cow stomach" or "pig bung;" I trust more a place that doesn't attempt to dissimulate with "offal" or "tripe."

Back in Cambridge, with my chicken in the oven, I knocked on my hallmates' doors and offered to brew a pot of tea. Leading the boy who accepted back into the kitchen, I felt gracious: the host, in command. He entered with a hesitation familiar to me; and though he relaxed to see the counters wiped and the knife put away, the smell of roasting meat remained: solid, unapologetic, growing stronger and more present as we drank our tea in the kitchen that I had, in some part, claimed.

This would not be the end of my discomfort in institutions such as that one; but sometimes, in rooms designed to make me uncomfortable, I have looked across the table at the plate of a person for whose comfort the room and institution were designed, and imagined how pale the other might turn if the chicken on their plate were to grow back its bones and feathers, if the pork were to heave up on hoofed trotter. I've scraped the innards from quails, pulling hearts and spleens like strings of dark, fleshy pearls; I've looked into a fish's cooked, opalescent eye because how else could I angle my chopstick to dig the best meat from its cheek? At times like this, there's a bracing rigor to my disdain - a fortifying splash of vinegar. I remember other places, other values, other rooms where I eat better than they do.

is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold Land of Milk and Honey, both out now.
is an illustrator and visual artist with a deep interest in food; particularly through the lens of culture, history and identity.

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The English language separates the ingredient from the animal in most cases. While a student at Cambridge, "Land of Milk and Honey" author C Pam Zhang learned that this squeamishness around meat extended to her peers' attitudes towards her cooking.

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Some more neologisms and slang terms getting codified

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Got rizz? Tom Holland memes propel popularity of 2023 word of the year

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Gen Z slang for charm or attractiveness sees off ‘Swiftie’, ‘situationship’ and ‘prompt’ in judges’ decision

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Check out the attitudes here - some grammatical concepts we know by other names (complements for example). What else can you see?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-objectively-objectionable-grammatical-pet-peeve

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Some nice formal language features here (second image), what can you find?

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Some nice formal language features here (second image), what can you find?

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JOY Media on Instagram: "JOY NEWS: Todd Fernando resigns as Victoria's LGBTIQ+ Commissioner

Victoria's LGBTQI+ Commissioner, Todd Fernando, has announced his resignation after two years as Victoria's "Chief Gay".

In a post made to Instagram, Fernando announced his resignation "with a heart full of gratitude and reflection", adding that "my heart is filled with gratitude for the trust and support of our diverse LGBTIQA+ communities".

"The journey doesn’t end here. It evolves, as does our fight for equality and inclusion. The bridge we've built together will continue to stand, welcoming new champions who will carry forward this legacy of love, resilience, and solidarity.
To everyone who’s been part of this journey, I thank you for the privilege of serving you on the path to a fairer and more inclusive world. In continued solidarity - Former Chief Gay."

Fernando was appointed to the role in September 2021 after Ro Allen became the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity and Human Rights.

A queer Wiradjuri man, Fernando became the firstout, queer Indigenous person to be appointed a Commissioner in Australia.

#LGBTQIA #JOY949 #JOYNews #OutLoudProud"

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110 likes, 3 comments - joy949 on November 16, 2023: "JOY NEWS: Todd Fernando resigns as Victoria's LGBTIQ+ Commissioner

Victoria's LGBTQI+ Commission..." 

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by JOY Media (@joy949)

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Check out this article from 2023-11-19 from the Age looking at Gen Alpha slang!

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ANDC shortlist highlights a range of cultural preoccupations from the year - neologisms and semantic changes.

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‘Matilda’ named Australia’s 2023 word of the year in nod to Tillies’ triumphs

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‘The original German name refers to strength in battle so it’s an appropriate name for a team that has inspired so many people,’ lexicographer says

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The First 10 Words of the African American English Dictionary Are In

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An exclusive look at a dictionary consisting entirely of words created or reinvented by Black people. (Don’t worry: All three variants of “bussin” are included.)

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Identity - motherhood, public portrayal, attitudes

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Identity - motherhood, public portrayal, attitudes

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Some examples of public language in the comments, along with Pittman's conative function to stop people commenting coupled with her emotive function of expressing how she is impacted - layers to look at here!

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Former Olympic athlete Jana Pittman and her teenage son Cornelis were the latest team to be eliminated from The Amazing Race: Celebrity Edition during Wednesday's episode - and Pittman spoke out over the show to reveal she was "heartbroken" by the criticism she'd received from viewers about her time on the show.

Pittman and her 17-year-old son came a respectable fifth place in the show, which this season has seen Australian celebrities pair up with a loved one for a race around countries including India, Cambodia and Malaysia.

But after their elimination, hurdling champ and mum of six Pittman shared a lengthy post on Instagram, revealing that viewer comments about her relationship with her son during the season had stung.

"Definitely heartbroken to read some super critical messages from people about our relationship and my mothering skills. That I babied him calling him buddy, that I was annoying and too critical," she began.

Pittman's not exaggerating - here's a sample of the Twitter reaction when the pair were on screen:

Recent posts to the show's Facebook page are also littered with comments from viewers complaining about Pittman's relationship with her son.

Pittman said she "heard" the critiques: "I watched the edit and cringed too... the portrayal of my mother-son relationship laid bare for all to comment on," she wrote.

Pittman explained that after a successful first six legs of the race, "the pressure built up and it got very hard," which played out on TV.

"Of course they mainly show the parts were we argue and I seem to push him too hard. It's reality TV!! It has definitely made me look at myself and realise I have to be less 'intense'.. do better.. enjoy life a little more. Listen closer.. It's a hard switch to turn off when you have been that way all your life.. but there were so many other fabulous moments where we pushed and supported each other well beyond our limits," she wrote.

In the lengthy post, shared after midnight in the hours after the episode aired, Pittman also called for compassion as she dealt with the criticism.

"Behind every celebrity is a person and most of us bleed and cry the same as everyone. Reading some tough comments makes my heart hurt. My stomach aches with disappointment and my brain won't switch off," she wrote.

"Yes I signed up to do it, so it's on me to wear this and I will but right now it hurts. Tomorrow I still have to get up, plaster a smile on, show up for patients, snuggle the kids and do a speaking gig but I will do it tired, as tonight I am teary, heart broken and feeling incredibly vulnerable," she revealed.

"So it's just a little shout out to remind us all, our words are powerful. Comments will likely reach the person they are about and if that's your intention great, but please remember theirs a person who breathes, cries and aches behind the 'name' and a director that has to get TV's turned on," she said.

The Amazing Race host Beau Ryan was among the first to offer their support for Pittman under her post, writing: "Walk tall Jana. You're a great mum and you both were fantastic on the race. Both you and Cor should be proud."

Jana and Cor's elimination leaves four teams in this season of the show: Darren McMullen and his nephew Tristan, Emma Watkins and her sister Hayley, Alli Simpson and her mum Angie and Harry Jowsey with his friend Teddy.

Ten recently revealed at their 2024 Upfronts that this Celebrity edition of The Amazing Race will return to screens next year.

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Jana Pittman 'heartbroken' by public backlash

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Former Olympic athlete Jana Pittman and her teenage son Cornelis were the latest team to be eliminated from The Amazing Race: Celebrity Edition during Wednesday's episode - and Pittman spoke out over the show to reveal she was "heartbroken" by the criticism she'd received from viewers about her time on the show.