I Had a Solander on Canberra Day

To non-Cockneys, one of the most baffling features about rhyming sland contnues to be the use of abbreviated, non-rhyming words

D\u27ou Etes-Vous?

There are only a few possiblilties for naming the inhabitants of places in the United States: New Yorker, Chicagoan, Philadelphian, Bostionian, Scrantonite. There may be more exotic forms for those from towns with French or Spanish names, but the possibilities fall far short of even Britain, where Oxonians come from Oxford, Cantabrigians from Cambridge, Liverpudlians from Liverpool, and Mancunians from Manchester. In my home town of Newcastle in New South Wales, we used to pride ourselves on our knowledge of Latin, calling ourselves Novocastrians

Telanagrams

To play Telanagrams, one must, like the inventor of the game, have a mind addicted to anagramitising. The game was devised at a time when no other amusements were available: while being paddled down the Sepik (Pike\u27s kepi\u27s spike) River in the heart of New Guinea\u27s (we sanguine!) least explored and most tropical (part coil, carp toil) area

A Rude Word in the Alphabet Soup

Horace Greerly looked at his spoon first in amazement, then in a mixture of disbelief and horror. Martha, he said finally. There\u27s a rude word in my alphabet soup

The Bwbachod

Bwbachod, pronounced boo-ba-khod. Welsh brownies whose outstanding characteristic is a dislike of teetotallers and dissenting ministers (Dictionary of Fairies)

Immeasurably Fishy

In a world where our weights and measures are increasingly being standardised to the efficient but dreary metric system, it is hard not to feel some sort of pang at the disappearance of the gloriously erratice measures of former days: the cubits and the ells, the arsins and the versts, leagues, grains, catties, scruples, and candareens. But all is not lost. Fishy Measure , which I discovered in a copy of Loyd\u27s Calendar for 1955, is hopefully continuing strong in the bleak wastes of the Outer Hebrides, at least. Here is the table in its entirety

Dictionaries and Podism

Podism? Foot-fetishism, perhaps, or a branch of chiropody? Neither: podism is a state of mental bias, like sexism and racism. Podism is the attitude that all civilization, science, and culture origniated in the Northern Hemisphere, and continues to be confined to that hemisphere. The derivation of my neologism will become clear when I say that I am an antipodist

Selected Research Papers of Don Laycock on Languages in Papua New Guinea

Digital images of Don Laycock's field notes and related materials for languages in Papua New Guinea