By David Astle
Quandaries come knocking day and night – verb dilemmas, grammar pickles. Matters can be technical or whimsical, trash or treasure, simple or impossible. Every morning I feel like Pandora prising open her inbox, seeing what problems have landed overnight.
Take Derek, for example. Working on a novel, Derek wanted to know the psychological antonym of voyeur. I suggested exhibitionist, and strangely never heard boo from Derek again. I hope he's OK.
Mystery of the Macquarie dictionary: "The case was cracked."Credit: Simon Letch
Meanwhile, Gillian Appleton was puzzled about why we say the ABC, but not the SBS. Parallels exist in the BBC, and ITV (or Independent Television). Seems the secret lies in nationality (Australian, say, or British) versus general adjective: special or independent.
Autumn's quirkiest query came from a man trying to build a non-phonetic alphabet. I'm not sure why. Word nerds don't need to ask. Chris Woods' ambition was to find 26 words with deceptive initials. Photo, say, sounds as if it starts with F. Just as N would seem to open gnome. Chris was having trouble matchmaking B, C, M, U and V.
Between blog and Twitter, a tribe of verbal diehards brainstormed B for vamos, C for kitchen, M for emblem, U for eulogy and V for Wiener schnitzel. Though the project's real triumph was refining Chris's K example. Instead of qiviut (the underwool of a musk ox), the sneaky alphabet now comes with quinoa.
Speaking of eulogies, such a request hit the inbox in early May. Richie Eder was honoured to speak at the funeral of Professor James Shannon, a dear friend. Not just an acclaimed chemistry don at UNSW, James was also a trailblazer in Organic Mass Spectrometry, not to mention a crossword nut.
As Richie wrote, "you tormented [James] for many, many years. I can't say he spoke highly of you with love in his voice, more frustration." Nonetheless, no eulogy felt whole without a clue, said Richie. Could I oblige? I chose to avoid the N-rife nightmare of Shannon to focus instead on the man's expertise: Professor James Shannon's talent dizzily rose among cryptic masters = Organic mass spectrometry. By all accounts the anagram lent some levity, and plenty of bewilderment, to the ceremony.
Moving from science to medicine, Dennis Burke visited his local clinic in Pambula to get the latest flu shot. A new dose from last winter, he explained, as a potent new strain had joined the airstream. "The nurse had a North American accent," he writes. "We confirmed my name, and the reason for my visit, and then got on with it. Yet a moment later, at the point of injection, I said to her ... 'New strain?'The nurse blinked. 'No,' she said. 'I'm Canadian'."
Afferbeck Lauder, the creator of Strine, and his dear friend Emma Chisit, would both revel in the episode. Just when our Aussie tongue seems endangered by Globish, software code and text-speak, up jumps evidence of Strine's own Gloria Sarah Titch.
Makes sense really. But does it make commonsense? This last mystery arrived via Kerri Smithers, responding to a rumour that "commonsense was being removed from the Macquarie dictionary". Kerri was horrified. A scarce commodity at the best of times, commonsense was surely a dictionary staple.
I took up the case on retainer. Made some calls. Wore down the shoe leather. Buttonholed some wordy dame called Susan Butler and quizzed her over gin rickeys. She fessed, "We had commonsense listed as one word, but later decided that people seem to be spelling it as two. So common sense now sits with commonsense as a variant."
The case was cracked. Five cases if we count Derek's fetish, though I'm still not sure how to parse the sublime Clive James wisdom: "A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing." Either way, there seems nothing common about the Wordplay inbox. Or eminently sensible either. But the verbal dance is a constant joy.