Call me Yamhill

Aussies

DEPARTURE

Hilary Kent, who began work at the Centre in 1992, retired at the end of February. She edited The Australian Little Oxford Dictionary(1995) and The Australian Oxford Minidictionary(1998), and was senior editor of The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary(1997) and The Oxford Australian Dictionary(forthcoming). She is greatly missed. We wish her well in her retirement.

We can all dob in to buy a present for a work mate’s birthday, but it is most un-Australian to dob in that same work mate if he takes a sickie and is sighted at the local racecourse. But where does the word come from? Do these two dob ins have the same origin? And do we have the same dob when an Aussie Rules footballer dobs the ball through the goalposts? The clue to the origin of these Australianisms may lie in British dialect. There we find the verb dob meaning ‘to put down an article heavily or clumsily; to throw down’, with examples from Nottinghamshire (‘I dobbed my cap on to the butterfly’) and Kent (‘Dob down the money’). The problem with this theory is that most Australian words and meanings which have their origin in British dialect appear during the nineteenth century. The Australian dob in does not appear until the 1950s. A second dialectal meaning of dob is ‘to throw stones etc. at a mark’. Thus from Cornwall we have ‘He dobbed a great stone at me’. In this case, one interesting aspect of the sense is its connection with the game of marbles. In Cheshire the verb means ‘to throw a piece of slate, or other flat missile, at marbles placed in a ring at a distance of about six or seven feet from the player’, and in Northamptonshire ‘When one boy strikes another boy’s marble, without his marble first touching the ground, he is said to dob on it’. A dobber in British dialect is ‘a large marble’. This word was retained in the United States, and in a 1934 text from the US we read: ‘There was marbles, and there was a game of marbles called Dobbers, played with marbles the size of lemons. You played it in the gutter on the way home from school, throwing your Dobber at the other fellow’s and he would throw his at yours’. Is it possible that the Australian notion of dobbing in, and being a dobber or dobber-in is a transfer from some aspect of the game of marbles? Were the terms dob, dob in, and dobber used in the game of marbles in Australia earlier this century? We have no evidence for this, but would welcome information from readers.

Mudgee stone. [f. the name of a town Mudgeein N.S.W.]
A slate found in the Mudgee district and particularly suitable for use as a whetstone; a whetstone of this material. Also Mudgee.
1909 R. KALESKI Austral Settler's Compl. GuideThe oilstones I prefer are the Lily white Washita or the best Mudgee stone. 1913 Lassetters' Compl. Gen. Catal.691 Stones, Turkey and Mudgee, in 14 lb. boxes. 1964 H.P. TRITTON Time means Tucker(rev. ed.) 47 A good whetstone was a prized possession and `Mudgee Stones' (a slate foundonly in that district) were always admired and envied... Few shearers would allow anyone to use their `Mudgee'.

We are now bringing together the work of the past ten years into a new edition of The Australian National Dictionary.The salient feature of our dictionary is the fact that, like the large Oxford English Dictionary,it is based on historical principles. This means that in addition to headwords, meanings, and etymologies, we give quotations (technically called citations) from texts to illustrate the history of the words in the dictionary.

The inset for the word Mudgee stone illustrates our methodology. We will be adding many new Australianisms to the dictionary, but we will also be adding what we call antedatings and postdatings. In the case of Mudgee stone we will be trying to find earlier written evidence for the existence of the word (i.e. an antedating) and later written evidence for the continuing use of the word (i.e. a postdating). We suspect that this is a ‘dead word’, but it is possible that we are wrong. As you can see from the citation evidence, we would also be interested in finding more quotations between 1913 and 1964 (technically these are called interdatings). We should like to have a citation from each decade.

So for the next few editions of Ozwordswe will be presenting a list of words for which we are seeking citation evidence, and asking readers of Ozwordsto let us know if they are able to track down written evidence for any of them. We are not interested in citations from dictionaries or books of slang. We are looking for fair dinkum usages. Here is the first list:

ADRIAN QUISTAustralian rhyming slang for ‘pissed, inebriated’. Post 1982.

BACHELOR'S QUARTERS‘accommodation provided on a station for single men, especially jackeroos and overseers’. Anything between 1891 and 1964, and post 1964. Also the variant bachelors’ hall (post 1913).

BOGAN GATE‘a makeshift gate of barbed wire and sticks’. Pre 1980 and post 1980.

BREAKAWAY ‘an animal that rushes free from a flock or herd’. Anything between 1881 and 1947, and between 1955 and 1990.

CHUNDER (or chunda) ‘to vomit’. Pre 1950, and between 1951 and 1963.

DINK (or double dink) ‘a lift on a bicycle, or a horse, ridden by another’. Post 1981.

DRY BIBLE‘a condition of cattle characterised by dryness of the omasum (third stomach), an affliction which may result from any of several causes, especially as occasioned by drought’. Post 1982, and 1943 to 1981.

FANG 1 (verb) ‘to drive in a motor vehicle at high speed’. Post 1984. 2 (noun) ‘a drive in a motor vehicle at high speed’. Post 1969.

FLAMING FURY‘an outdoor earth closet, so called because the contents are periodically doused with a flammable liquid and ignited’. Pre 1960 and post 1982.

GOON ‘a flagon (or cask) of wine’. Pre 1982.

JIG ‘to play truant from school’. Pre 1977.

LIZARD ‘a flathead (i.e. the fish)’. Pre 1990

MAGIC PUDDING This now means ‘an endlessly renewable resource’ and it is clearly derived from Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding(1918). We are searching for any pre 1995 evidence of the figurative use of the term.

ON ONE'S ACE ‘on one’s own, using one’s own resources; alone’. Post 1968.

PUT THE ACID ON ‘to exert a pressure which is difficult to resist’. Post 1968.

UP IN ANNIE'S ROOM (behind the clock etc.) ‘the supposed location of something that cannot be found’. Anything from 1950 to 1980, and post 1982.

posted by Yamhill @ 1:21 AM