LEXICOGRAPHY:
The usually secretive international body controlling the contents of the world’s dictionaries held a rare emergency session overnight to consider urgent changes to the definition of some words.
The hastily arranged meeting of the executive committee of the Ancient Order of Lexicographers (AOOL) held in Rome was arranged in the wake of yesterday’s appearance by Australia’s Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus at a Canberra news conference.
“The meeting was necessary after the appearance in news reports of Mr Dreyfus’s comments at the news conference discussing the Australian Government’s response to a High Court ruling outlawing indefinite detention of asylum seekers,” an AOOL spokesperson speaking in Latin told The Bug’s Rome bureau.
“Our Australian delegate alerted the AOOL secretariat to several of those news reports, especially News reports, and an emergency meeting was arranged in Rome where the executive committee members watched a replay of the news conference.”(main picture)
The AOOL spokesperson, swapping to ancient Greek, said the committee then compared Mr Dreyfus’s performance with media reports of him having “berated” and “attacked” a journalist for asking a particular question, that he “erupted”, “blew up”, and “thundered” his answer, and “furiously” or “angrily” refused to apologise to the journalist.
“When they finished watching and rewatching the video tape of Mr Dreyfus the executive members admitted to being quite puzzled,” the AOOL spokesperson said in Arabic.
“They all agreed he had been firm in his response to the question but all of them refused to concede he behaved as described in media reports.
“Everyone around the table breathed a sigh of relief because if they had agreed with the media descriptions it would have meant rewriting all the currently accepted definitions for words like ‘angry’, ‘berate’, ‘attack’, ‘erupt’, and ‘thunder’ along with others. So we certainly dodged a bullet on that one.
“But the incident has prompted the AOOL to consider entering at least one new word in dictionaries as they are reprinted or republished.
“The new word is ‘skynews’ and its definition as agreed by the AOOL executive committee is to ask a fucking stupid partisan gotcha question of a Labor government while never contemplating asking it of previous Liberal administrations who also first applied indefinite detention orders from 2004 onwards,” the AOOL spokesperson said, lapsing briefly into Aramaic.
The AOOL spokesperson said it was hoped that “skynews” might be judged as the word of the year when the winner is announced in late 2024.
“We reckon it’s in with a chance,” he said. “If that fucking stupid ‘rizz’ can win it, anything’s possible.”
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