lexicon
Englishes of the world
Deepti

Play a while

The development of a society can be viewed through the words it creates. Pick up any newspaper or magazine or switch on the TV and you will notice many new words that are made up of two already existing words and due to these known words, their meaning needs no explanation. Some instances are retiresurance (retire + insurance), campuspreneur (campus + entrepreneur) and hintfiction (hint + fiction). The last word refers to small, bite-sized portions of fiction as opposed to the weighty sagas of the good ol’ days.

Learn a little

Plagued by the Tiger-mother syndrome, Asian parents need to watch out before demanding too much from their children. If the latest neologisms are any indication, parenting style is in dire need of re-engineering today. The latest expression ‘hurried child syndrome’ refers to the situation in which parents over schedule their children’s lives, push them hard for academic success and expect them to behave and react as miniature adults. And when this creates problems, they become lawnmower parents who try to smooth the child’s path through life by solving all problems for the child.

Intriguing words

An interesting word from Australian slang is the word ‘dinkum’ that is a dialect word for ‘work’. So, ‘fair dinkum’ refers to ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’. Australia is a rare instance of a country that has slang that is well-documented. The national song of the country, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ has many slang words and the Sydney Olympics Website carried a short glossary of slang for visitors. There were words like ‘bathers’ (swimsuit), ‘thongs’ (flip-flops), ‘pokies’ (slot machines) and ’Pom’ (person from U.K.). Just as words from all other varieties of world, English have found a place in the dictionaries, slang from Australia can be found in most standard dictionaries.

Precise usage

While talking about a language you know, you should say ‘I can speak French fluently’ or ‘I learnt German for a year’ but when you talk about a language in terms of its history, structure or features then you would say ‘I am working on the evolution of the Punjabi language’ or ‘The Sanskrit language has a very old history’.