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Word Watch
Dr Bruce Moore is the Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, a joint venture between Oxford University Press and ANU. In this column, he takes a lexicographical look at our lingua franca.
Twenty years ago dictionary makers scoured through their dictionaries looking for man-compounds that were sexist because they were not inclusive and proceeded to emasculate them. Thus, in definitions, a term such as ‘mankind’ became ‘humankind’, and ‘man-made’ became ‘artificial’. Lexicographers, unlike some compilers of style guides, did not enter the cloud-cuckoo land of banning such terms as ‘man-eating lions’, ‘no-man’s land’, and ‘manhole’ (person-eating lions, no-person’s land, and personhole). One of the results of the sexist language debate was that there was a great reluctance to create compound terms containing ‘man’, whether or not sexism was involved.
But the man compounds are back. Some of them are certainly not complimentary. ‘Man flu’ is the common cold transformed into a disease of life-threatening proportions. A ‘man stand’ is the pose adopted by a male who waits outside a shop while his female partner is shopping inside, nonchalantly pretending that he is not there, while every gesture or eye movement gives him away. ‘Man boobs’ describe the flabby breasts of an obese male.
Some more positive terms are registered on urbandictionary.com. We know we are in a post-metrosexual age when terms such as ‘man date’ and ‘man crush’ appear. Urban Dictionary defines man date as ‘an occasion when two straight men get together’ or ‘an outing in which two men engage in normal male-female date activity’. A man crush is more intimate, but still crossing no sexual boundaries. Urban Dictionary gives the definition “when a straight man has a ‘crush’ on another man, not sexual but kind of idolising him”, and adds the illustrative sentence: “Many straight men end up having man crushes on Johnny Depp (I don’t blame them).”
I wondered if these were exclusively American terms until I came across an article in the travel section of the Sydney Morning Herald, which extolled the advantages of ‘mancations’ and ‘mancursions’, holidays when two blokes, or a group of blokes, go off on a holiday together and do blokey things.
‘Mancation’ (= man vacation) and ‘mancursion’ (= man excursion) are ‘blends’, or what Lewis Carroll called ‘portmanteau words’, after the luggage case that opened into two parts. Humpty Dumpty explains that slithy is a combination of the two words lithe and slimy: “You see, it’s like a portmanteau–there are two meanings packed into one word”. Blends were very rare before the twentieth century, but they are now one of the most popular ways of creating new words. Man boobs soon moved from a compound to the blend ‘moobs’; Borat has made the ‘mankini’ (= man bikini) the unthinking metrosexual’s fashion accessory; and ‘manscaping’, the removal of excess body hair, is the necessary preparation for the mankini parade.
And then, of course, there is the bromance! If in doubt, consult urbandictionary.com.
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ANU
Reporter
Winter 2008
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