Special N.Z. Section In New Dictionary

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31981, 7 May 1969, Page 22

Special N.Z. Section In New Dictionary

The unique Antipodean meanings m some colourful words, and many words unknown outside New Zealand and Australia, are given in a special section of the new, fifth edition of the “Pocket Oxford Dictionary”.

A selection of the lyords and meanings given ip- this section includes: to bludge is to shirk or scrounge; if you are crook you are not well, but if you go crook you are angry; a no-hoper is useless; hooray is a New Zealand way of saying good-bye; taniwha, a mythical monster inhabiting deep water (Maori).

The man behind the special supplement is Mr. R. W. Blanchfield, a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar, and now editor of the “Oxford English Dictionary Supplement". The vocabulary is drawn from a wide range of Australian and New Zealand printed sources from nineteenth-cen-tury pioneering times up to the present day. It makes an historically-valuable and very entertaining addition to the dictionary. Many of the words tell the story of the natural riches of the country, and the hard work of the settlers. There are words about forest and pasture, gold-mining, and especially about sheep—mustering them, moving them, shearing them, the men who do the work, and the dogs that help them. The “Pocket Oxford Dictionary” was compiled by the brothers, H. W. and F. G. Fowler, and first published in 1924. Like all the Oxford dictionaries, its ultimate source is the great 13-volume “Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles.” The fifth edition has been revised by E. Mclntosh, with etymologies revised by G. W. S. Friedrichsen. It is 1100 pages long. The changes made in the “Pocket Orford Dictionary" for the new fifth edition are a reflection of the social history of England since 1942, when the last edition was published. The newly-added words set the contemporary scene. There, are not only words of the hew technology: cyber-

netics, laser, maser, sputnik, and so on. There are also the more domestic words that one takes for granted, forgetting how recently they became part of life. They tell a story of shopping in the supermarket, for scampi and paperbacks, of drip-dry T-shirts for teen-agers, of golden handshakes and retirement pensions, of sacred cows and saunas. New senses are added to old words: there are sick jokes and surgical transplants. More subtle changes are made In definitions and illustrative quotations. A driver had survived as a “coachman” in the last edition, a suitcase was a “small portmanteau”, a table-cloth was “a covering Of white linen used at meals or of coloured material used at other times”. Few women since the war have had their golves stretched; shoes are stretched in the new edition to illustrate the meaning of the word. “Over Home Rule the Liberals split” becomes “over capita) punishment the parties split.” Nothing any longer “plies between Deal and Dover”; instead it “runs between London and Brighton." It would be anachronistic now to say "it needs more servants than I have”; in the fifth edition it just needs more money. No-one can now be said to “get £1 a week”; it has gone up to £2O. And seme of the sad old words like workhouse have been marked “historical”; so has yeomen prickers (huntsmen of Royal Hunt).