It's hard to believe that Macie had her first birthday yesterday. Tempus fugit.
David Astle produces the cryptic crossword for the Sydney Morning Herald and, for many years, was the wordsmith on the SBS show Letters and Numbers. He also occasionally appears on the ABC, talking about how the English language is changing. I'm reading one of his books at the moment.
He is certainly a ratbag and the book introduces the reader to other ratbags with very specific interests. Roger Caillous, for example, made it his life's work to categorise games into four groups. crosswords belong in the Agon box, where games of competition go. Charades is a game of Mimicry. Alea takes in games of chance, and Ilinx encompasses games of giddiness, like rolling down a hill.
Several new words there but I don't have room in my brain to remember them.
Every year, new words come into our language. Technology throws up a lot and people like Donald Trump even invent them - covfefe? Others just seem to catch on. It seems that I am a blogan, a person who write a blog. I used to think of myself as a blogmeister but that is a bit pretentious.
I don't like blogan. Maybe it raises too many echoes of another very Australian word with unpleasant connotations. But, when I take a closer look, there's an 'l' of a difference between blogan and bogan. Boom boom!
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