Antarctic exiles warm to new lingo
By Shelly Simonds "Don't come near me with that jobbie you rotten JAFA!" What do you do when you're a scientist trying to make it through the Antarctic winter? Read, sleep, drink - help create a new language? If you didn't think the latter would be part of the Antarctic experience, Bernadette Hince can set you straight. She is writing a dictionary of language specific to the world's southernmost continent. A Visiting Fellow at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) at the ANU, Ms Hince noticed years ago that friends returning from Antarctica were using some original words to describe their experience - the dangers of being "slotted" (falling into a crack in the ice), the emotion of a "greenout" (seeing green again after having adjusted to a 100 shades of white), the trouble of "big eye" (insomnia caused by Antarctica's 24-hour sunlight) and the difficulty of dealing with "JAFAs" (Just Another Flaming Academic). Creating a dictionary of terms seemed just the ticket for a trip to Antarctica, a place she had always dreamed of visiting. In 1995 she received a Thomas Ramsay Science and Humanities Fellowship to work on her dictionary, but it didn't include passage for a hands-on expedition. She got her chance however, when a sympathetic biologist, working in the Australian Antarctic Division, offered her a berth as a volunteer assistant. She spent three months in Antarctica researching Weddell seals by measuring them and collecting frozen stool samples or "jobbies" to be "RTA-ed" (returned to Australia) for analysis. "Anything can be RTA-ed: people, samples, letters," said Ms Hince. "Antarctic expeditioners have a real fondness for acronyms." Ms Hince became interested in dictionary writing in 1988 while working on natural history entries for the Australian National Dictionary published by Oxford University Press and produced at ANDC. Ms Hince is still looking for a publisher for her work, Dictionary of Antarctic English. The proliferation of special Antarctic lingo is the result of a small community living in isolation with so many new things to see and not enough words to describe them, Ms Hince said. " 'Greenout' is a word that really needed to be invented. It's amazing to come back from a place that's white and dulling to the senses, to a land that's green and fresh smelling," said Ms Hince. "The word matches-up nicely with 'whiteout' which is when you can't distinguish land from the sky. This can be very dangerous and disorienting," she said. About 10 per cent of the dictionary is dedicated to describing ice in its various forms. "Grease" ice is made up of ice crystals which look like a milky film on the water. "Frazil" ice is thicker and slushy, while "pancake ice" is rounded with raised edges. The condition of ice is important to expeditioners for a number of reasons, including knowing when it's safe to walk on for field research or a "jolly" (an excursion for pleasure). Misjudging the condition of the ice can be fatal - during a trip away from base in the early part of this century two early expeditioners misjudged how strong the ice was and were swept out to sea on a segment which broke away during a storm. Ms Hince said she enjoyed reviewing history and collecting terms for her dictionary. "Dictionaries are such lively things. You get a great sense of power when you get to define a word," said Ms Hince.