Caitlin Cassidy at the Guardian gives us a primer on Australian election terms:
Rorts
Voters hate rorts, and politicians love to accuse each other of rorting. Rorts come in many forms. Election rorts are when the parties distribute taxpayer dollars unfairly to boost their chances of winning votes – like handing out grants for community sports clubs based on colour coded spreadsheets rather than merit. […]
Corflutes
Corflutes are plastered across every major street in Australia for a few weeks when an election is taking place and then disappear into the ether. The word is a registered trademark of Corex Australia, denoting, in a political context, corrugated plastic sheeting used for temporary signage to promote a candidate, found anywhere from shopping centres to trees, highways or front gardens. Essentially, it’s a waterproof poster, but Australians call it a corflute. […]
Stoush
Stoush is a word the media loves to use whenever there is conflict. It spans a wide spectrum: if you’re in an animated debate, that’s a stoush. If you’re brawling, that’s a stoush. If you’ve taken someone to court – stoush. Same goes for policy disagreements, factional differences, campaign disputes. Parties may be stoushing internally, or with other parties, industry groups or lobbyists. The prime minister was even involved in a stoush with Canada over Vegemite.
Needless to say, there has also been an outbreak of corflute stoushes.
Click through for more, including fake tradies, the donkey vote, and spruiking (which we discussed here in 2021). The OED says rort is “Probably a back-formation < rorty adj. [Boisterous, rowdy; saucy; jolly, cheery. Also: dissipated, profligate]”; for stoush it says:
Perhaps compare Scots stash (1851), stush (1892), stoush (1914), all in the sense ‘uproar, disturbance, row, brawl’ (shortened < stushie n.; compare forms at that entry); however, a derivation from this word (although often suggested) would present phonological and semantic difficulties […]
Thanks, Trevor!
It’s not as inherently-colorful a word, perhaps, but somewhere along the way I learned that “spill” has a specific meaning in Australian-politics jargon that I think no outsider would correctly infer from the other senses of the noun “spill” they might have been familiar with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_spill
Thanks for that — a very interesting word/usage!
KIWI DOLE BLUDGE RORT PROBE
Essentially, it’s a waterproof poster, but Australians call it a corflute.
Actually we don’t. A careful observer of vocabulary trends over the decades, I had never seen or heard the word till it turned up in this article two days ago – just as I had never heard ranga for “redhead” till it was bruited around as the traditional and almost compulsory term. I’m sure those I grew up with hadn’t either. That Conversation article offered no definition, but used corflute twenty times.
The expressions covered in the Guardian piece are put forth by a smug self-assigned élite for quiet acceptance by us all. Not by me, thank you.
If you put “corflute” into Google Books search, you’ll get lots of hits, including one for a parody of “Nowhere Man” that begins “He’s just a corflute man.” I fear you’re succumbing to the “I’m not familiar with it, therefore it doesn’t exist” fallacy.
No I’m not! I did a Google books search of course, and found it used as a term of art in event management – O, and packaging technology, beekeeping, and other tightly circumscribed contexts. The Conversation article assumed we’d all know the term; we emphatically do not. If it were just me I’d accept and acknowledge my observational failure.
Your “Nowhere Man” example is from 2023, and issues from the Canberra political commentariat – or at least tries to seem to issue from such an “authoritative” source.
It’s more complicated than that. The Australian National Dictionary Centre has a different origin for rort: from wrought — which implies it’s only coincidentally similar to rorty. They link to Oxford Australia Word of the Month from July 2010, which gives more detail:
Now, the OED’s rort was revised in September 2010, so presumably they got that memo in time, but they must not have entirely accepted the argument, since they kept the ‘fraud’ and ‘party’ senses in the same entry and only said that the ‘fraud’ sense was “influenced by association with wrought”.
If you put “corflute” into Google Books search, you’ll get lots of hits, including one for a parody of “Nowhere Man” that begins “He’s just a corflute man.”
Disclaimer- I had never heard or read the word before this afternoon, and have no canine in this competition.
I put “corflute” intoGoogle advanced search, specifying Australia as the region of interest. I then selected “books”. Scrolling through four or five pages of results, political uses accounted for fewer than ten percent of the results. The term had no particular political identity. Rather, it was almost a generic term for signage, and just happened to be used in a political context.
Cuchuflete:
Sure. A technical term first of all, with a few limited applications. By no means used or even known by Australians generally. Here we see it in an Australian book published in 2024, where and when the author quite rightly felt it necessary to give a definition: “corflute, a type of corrugated plastic that is strong and lightweight and easy to transport”.
I put “corflute” into Google advanced search, specifying Australia as the region of interest.
How exactly did you do that, as a matter of separate interest?
“no canine in this competition”? Surely you meant “no shepherd in this stoush”.
Noetica,
1. Select Google Advanced Search.
2. Type corflute or whatever term you like into the uppermost search box, the one labeled
“ all these words:”
3. Go down the page six data entry boxes to the one called “region”.
4. place your cursor in the data entry box. A pop up window will appear with countries in alphabetical order. Scroll down to Australia.
5. Bob’s your uncle.
6. Press Enter, then select “Books”
7. Enjoy gems such as, “ … corflute plastic tunnels spaced 100 m apart . Each tunnel was baited with rabbit meat on a central sponge soaked in blue food dye , between two papers that collected animal footprints .”
Now then, if this were about U.S. politics, we would substitute ’Hyena’ for rabbit, and the sponge would be MAGA red, but I digress.
You digress? At the Hattery? Tsk!
Thanks for the details.
I assumed that “stoush” was pronounced “stoosh”, like “stooshie” in Proper English (i.e. Scots), but I see that this is Not So.
Hmm. I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone say “stoush” out loud, but my default expectation given English’s notoriously transparent phonemic orthography would have been for the MOUTH vowel, which the internet informs me is in fact what you get. The fact that the Scottish National Dictionary gives “stooshie” as a variant of “stashie,” together with numerous other variants including steeshie, steishie, and stishie, suggests to me that the Scots had somehow rather spectacularly failed to achieve consensus on a vowel. Or at least that seems more probable than that all Scots pronounced the word the same but had radically divergent theories as to how to represent that pronunciation orthographically.
my default expectation given English’s notoriously transparent phonemic orthography would have been for the MOUTH vowel
Mine too, but my wife’s intuition agreed with DE’s. English is a minefield and a mindfuck.
@JWB I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone say “stoush” out loud,
Huh? I know I’m the whole Tasman Sea away, but I’ve heard it plenty in both Aus-origin broadcasting and NZ. Indeed, the MOUTH vowel.
“Corflute”, on the other hand, I’ve never heard. I’m quite familiar with the thing, so since the topic’s come up, I know of no word for them. Indeed used for realtors’ signs (and political posters/hoardings).
Another Australian here. I started seeing the word ‘corflute’ a few years ago. I have a note in my files from 2017 with a citation and I wrote then that I had already seen it a few times. It may be a niche term or even restricted to certain regions. Perhaps it is more common in South Australia, where I live. I haven’t seen any physical corflutes, except outside pre-poll locations, for this election because of SA law: ‘Electoral (Control of Corflutes) Amendment Act 2024’.
On the other hand, ‘ranga’ is not a term I heard until a few years ago, when people kept saying it was common.
Or at least that seems more probable than that all Scots pronounced the word the same but had radically divergent theories as to how to represent that pronunciation orthographically
Myself, I actually say something like [styʃi], so perhaps that’s not (quite) as improbable as it might appear.
I’m also Australian and I too wasn’t familiar with the meaning of corflute. Seems to be a term mainly known to those more closely involved in the business of advertising and/politics. I could recall seeing the term before, but I couldn’t have told you what it meant; I would have probably thought it was some sort of champagne glass.
But all the other terms in that Guardian article are perfectly familiar to me and also to nearly all Australians, I would think, with the exception of “fake tradies” which is definitely a bit more obscure; I think the article is definitely over-egging it by saying that the term “sprang to prominence”…
“Ranga” is perhaps generational. I’ve known what that meant at least since the prime-ministership of Julia Gillard, I think. (It may also help in no small part that I am myself a ranga.)
This is the time of year when the local press—yes, we still have news that comes off on your hands—runs the breathy perennial articles about how to get rich catching elvers. I’ll have to write a Letter to the Editor to suggest that there are other important matters to discuss, such as the following.
source: https://australiatravelquestions.com/practicalities/meaning-of-ranga/
I think the article is definitely over-egging it by saying that the term “sprang to prominence”
That’s just standard journalese: never say something in a boring way when you could (by stretching the truth, if necessary) say it in an exciting way.
But also, use words like “but,” “however,” and similar contrastives even if there’s no actual contrast…
…And make every sentence start a new paragraph!
If David E. pronounces “st*shie” with a vowel not usually found in the inventory of Scots or English, I guess that would indeed mean there’s less likely to be a commonly-shared intuitive way to spell his pronunciation as eye-dialect.
This one, give or take a bit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_near-front_rounded_vowel
It’s a pairrfectly respectable Scottish vowel.
I, too, became familiar with “corflute” several years ago, first in the context of the social media of contacts who get involved in political campaigns, more recently in a couple of media articles covering corflute stoushes. Obviously a bit of jargon word, but I don’t think the article was trying to imply otherwise.
As for “spill”, that meaning isn’t restricted to politics. One way of implementing a corporate restructure, particular is some particular group is downsized, is often described as “spill and fill” – meaning that all employees lose their roles and may apply for new positions in the new structure.
I don’t think I do use that vowel, but I could – I knew exactly what DE meant. A respectable Scottish vowel, as he says.
Stooshie/stushie (which I think are representations of the same set of pronunciations) seems to have settled down as the modern version – ‘stashie’ spellings seem to mostly belong to the first half of the 19th century.
I also initially read ‘stoush’ as if it was ‘stoosh’ – ‘couthie’ can be ‘coothie’ and ‘courie’ is usually ‘coorie’, but I think uncouth is always uncouth.
@Noetica
Australian here.
I think people must differ in the rate at which they notice or start to use new words
I’ve been aware of “corflute” for probably 5 to 10 years.
A more subtle bit of Down-Under political jargon: the somewhat fortuitous history of why it’s the “Australian Labor Party” not “LaboUr Party.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party#Name_and_spelling
the way the spelling of ‘Labor Party’ was consolidated had more to do with the chap who ended up being in charge of printing the federal conference report than any other reason
I love it.
Julian:
I think people must differ in the rate at which they notice or start to use new words
Of course, but it’s not that simple. I’ve voted over several decades in Australia; I’ve handed out how-to-vote cards, surrounded by signage; I’ve been a polling-booth scrutineer; and I’ve stood as a candidate (local government in Victoria, under a system pretty much the same as state and federal – on a single issue, and through energetic campaigning I neutralised, through my preferences, a social and environmental threat in our area from a US-based multinational). By the definition strongly implicit in the SA Electoral (Control of Corflutes) Amendment Act 2024 (mentioned above), I even produced and displayed “corflutes” depicting me.
Neither that legislation nor the Conversation article I appeal to above defines corflute:
I’ve been aware of “corflute” for probably 5 to 10 years
I’ve been aware of it for three days. And since the political involvement I spoke of dates back some years, though I had already voted early I took the opportunity yesterday (Saturday 3 May 2025: voting day in our federal general election*) of visiting a polling booth (Victoria, non-metropolitan). I asked the eight people who were handing out cards what they called “those signs”. Four did not come up with corflute, and did not recognise the term when I put it to them. One other came up with the term as an alternative to poster. Three gave it as their first choice, but two of these independently voluteered that it actually referred to the material, not to the poster itself.
On all this evidence, I say that it is inaccurate or at least misleading to report that “it’s a waterproof poster, but Australians call it a corflute”. The word may not even be known by a clear majority of those involved in our grass-root political processes; and Australians who do know it can instead mean a [political] poster in general, or the corrugated plastic material of which some political posters are made.
It’s as if I were to tell the world that Australians call potato cakes scallops, or potato scallops as opposed to sea scallops. Misleading, because of clear differences by state, region, or culinary orientation. And don’t get me started on spring onions, shallots, eshallots, eschallots, echalottes, or scallions across our regions.
* No politics at the Hattery of course; but I can report that the centre left prevailed in an historic triumph. Partly, as in Canada, a general recoil against American chainsaw fascism: a tenuous silver lining, as the clouds of doom darken around us all.
Indeed yes. Awstralia am byth! ¡Canadá sí, Yanqui no!
I think it’s fair to say that ‘corflute’ is in a different category of word from ‘rort’ and ‘stoush’.
I am an urban speaker of AuE, not broad at all, and I’d consider ‘rort’ /ɹɔːt/ and ‘stoush’ /stauʃ/ to be everyday vocabulary. I genuinely hadn’t even realised they’re Australianisms. (‘Spruik’ /spɹuːk/ too, in the article.) These are very common words, that have no necessary connection to politics.
‘Corflute’, on the other hand, is definitely a newcomer. I don’t dispute there may be some historic precedent for it, but it certainly wasn’t a common word until recently. It strikes me as an obscure bit of slang or insider jargon that some journalist may have discovered an election or two ago, and helped popularise among other journalists. I’ve never seen or heard it in the wild.
(Using conventional English IPA above. For AuE, the reality would be more like /ɹɔːt/~/ɹoːt/, /stæɔʃ/~/stɛːoʃ/, and /spɹʉwk/~/spɹəːwk/)
an historic triumph.
Yes, we were very pleased to hear of it at Casa Hat.
Political coverage seems an ideal vector of specialized vocabulary to (selectively) cross over. I would not be surprised if someone found an Australian report that chad is what Americans normally call bits of paper waste, due to Bush v. Gore. Or that bug is an ordinary word for a logo due to the evergreen scandal of using non-union printers for campaign material.
Given the nature and use of the “union bug” I would think it might generalize not to logos in general but to other instances of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certification_mark. Although if the sociolinguistic conditions were propitious, maybe “hecksher” (currently used to describe the “bugs” used by the various kosher-certification agencies/organizations) would be the one to generalize, since “kosher” itself already has a metaphorical extended meaning and e.g. the union bug certifies that the campaign material bearing it is “kosher” from a not-getting-crosswise-with-organized-labor standpoint.
FWIW, it’s now mandatory here for the posters before an election to be printed on corrugated plates. Not always plastic, though, one print shop I found claims that they are FSC certified (but they may just have that on all their products; another shop tells me it’s 2.5mm plastic, 450g/m2); they are not brown like corrugated cardboard and they seem stiffer. (No trade mark mentioned, they are called kanalplader here).
(Or maybe it’s not mandatory in national law to use that specific product, but each municipality can also make rules because they have to clear away the ones that the parties don’t take down themselves, and not having to sort stuff before recycling is easier. In any case it changed some years ago from an assortment of fibreboard and cardboard solutions that were not always structurally intact after a week of proper autumn rain).
Oh, question: do you pronounce the h?
being in charge of printing. And that’s why you don’t need a King when you have a Secretary General.
What, if anything, is the US President even the president of? The Vice President is the president of the Senate when needed, that much I know, and I know the story about Washington asking to be just “President” instead of “High King Omnipotent” or whatever the suggestion was, but was he actually the president of anything relevant at the time?
FWIW, the Danish Parliament has a Chairman (formand) who actually ranks ahead of the Prime Minister on very formal occasions, like the King’s Galla Dinners. And they oversee the agenda, which could theoretically bring a motion to a vote even if the government doesn’t want it. (Cf. the Commons).
Washington was president of the Constitutional Convention, and since the later job was created with him in mind as the first holder, they may have just stuck with the same title.
But what the title was intended to convey, maybe we cannot ever really know, unless it’s explained in The Federalist (which it may well be, but if so I don’t remember). It is sort of amazing that the American system of governance has lasted as long as it has, given how many parts of the apparatus failed to function as intended essentially immediately.
OED (entry revised 2007):
The OED’s oldest sense of “president” is “1.a.
a1382–
The appointed governor or lieutenant of a province, or other division of a country, as a colony, city, etc. Also: spec. the governor of a factory or province in India under the East India Company (cf. presidency n. 3a). Now historical.”
There are other senses before the originally American one of “elected head of state” that don’t refer to presiding over an assembly. However, the OED’s definition of that American sense is
EDIT: Ninja’ed by Hat, so I’ll just leave the next two citations:
1784
Every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary..shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the same shall take effect, shall be approved by him.
Acts & Laws State Connecticut 3
1789
The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years.
Constitution of United States ii. §1
I note also that an earlier (Now historical) sense was “The chief magistrate of certain British colonies in North America, and of their successor states,” e.g.:
FWIW, the Danish Parliament has a Chairman (formand) who actually ranks ahead of the Prime Minister on very formal occasions, like the King’s Galla Dinners.
Same is true for the president of the Bundestag, who outranks the Chancellor in protocol.
Note that the underlying Latin verb praesideo may have a wider range of meanings than English “preside,” including (per wiktionary) e.g. guard, watch, protect, defend, direct, command, control, govern, superintend …
In the current U.S. business world it is often the case that the president of a corporation is also the chairman [or chair-something-else] of the corporation’s board of directors, but this is not always the case. The roles are distinct and can be held by separate individuals and it’s the “chair” role rather than the “president” role that involves “presiding over” something like an elected assembly.
The U.S.’s oldest surviving tertiary educational institution, Harvard College, has used “president” as the title of its head dude beginning in 1640, with the second holder of the office, Henry Dunster. Quoth wikipedia “At Dunster’s alma mater, Magdalene College [Cantab.],* the presiding officer was called the master and his second the president. Some have speculated that he borrowed the term out of a sense of humility.” Unfortunately, Pres. Dunster’s tenure ended in controversy after 14 years when he was “Forced to resign for speaking out against and interrupting infant baptisms.”
I suppose you could argue that a college’s president “presides over” … some group. The faculty, the fellows, the members of the governing board?
*At Magdalen College [Oxon.], by contrast, “President” is the title of the #1 dude, although I can’t swear it was that way four centuries ago. I don’t know whether a formal #2 position is still current in either Cambridge or Oxford colleges.
#1 dude
The female equivalent being #1 dowd ?
“#1 duds and dowds”: those who buckle to Chief Chainsaw.
Our Royal medical colleges have presidents. I suppose they do preside over their governing councils. Doesn’t seem to apply to Royal Colleges across the board: the Royal College of Music has a Director. (I’d have gone with “Conductor” myself …)
I see that back when the Royal College of Surgeons of England was only a mere Company, rather than a College, it had a Master rather than a President.
My own College of Surgeons (of Edinburgh) had a Deacon before it got a royal charter, which is obviously better than a mere Master.
WP reminds me that when the original Edinburgh Guild of Barbers and Surgeons was formally inaugurated in 1505, it introduced the innovative provision that surgical apprentices had to be literate. One can debate the wisdom of this somewhat arbitrary restriction.
@J. W. Brewer: The OED has the “#1dude(tte) at a college” sense, with citations back to 1448, including one for Harvard from 1642.
Maybe also relevant to the U.S. Constituion:
“2.e.
1762–
North American. The head officer of a company, who handles the day-to-day management of the company.
The president may sometimes report to a board of directors, headed by a chairman, which has ultimate control over the company.
1762
The several opulent Companies, which have been, from time to time, established at Copenhagen, every one of which has its own president, directors, and other officers.
New Syst. Geography 74
1781
A corporation..by the name and stile of ‘The President, Directors and Company of the Bank of North America’.
Journals Continental Congr. 1774–89 (Library of Congr.) (1912) vol. XXI. 1188 [etc.]”
Wiki alleges that “From 1938 to 1989, the chairman of the Presidium [of the Supreme Soviet] was reckoned as the USSR/Soviet Union’s head of state and was sometimes referred to as the ‘President of the USSR/Soviet Union’ in non-Soviet sources.” “President of the Presidium” would I guess have sounded too comical?
Now I’m wondering if there’s a different Latin word for a university’s “praeses” who is female, which seems relevant since my alma mater’s new praeses-or-? is indeed female and they’ve got to put out a bunch of diplomas in Latin later this month.
The Russian title was predsedatel’, which is usually translated as “chairman”.
Jon:
I think it’s fair to say that ‘corflute’ is in a different category of word from ‘rort’ and ‘stoush’.
Agreed. Those two are well understood in news reports here, aren’t they? Even if many, like me, exclude them from active use.
David M:
[Regarding my “an historic”]: Oh, question: do you pronounce the h?
Invariably. And the rule I have observed myself following:
An option, yes. I consider a few matters of context and register when deciding between “a h-” and “an h-”.
The French equivalent is président de la République… though it’s not that old, of course.
Maybe that’s been skunked since 1989.
Ah, hence the title “President and CEO”.
Not even in German. Die Studienpräses signed some of my paperwork.
Re American political usage, both Delaware and Pennsylvania used “President” as the first title for their post-Independence chief executives, beginning in 1777, but changed the title to “governor” effective with the elections of 1792 and 1790, respectively, after the federal Constitution was in place and George Washington was serving as THE President. These state-level presidents were already in place before the first pre-Constitution “President[s] of the United States in Congress Assembled.”
Treating “President” as a federal-level-only title in this context is maybe parallel to the quaint Canadian custom [ETA: maybe Australian too?] of the Dominion as a whole having a “prime minister” while the individual provinces each have a “premier,” even though in most contexts “premier” is simply a posh synonym for “prime minister.”* This has apparently led to the clunky Canadianism “First Ministers” to mean something like “the current Prime Minister and the current Premiers, treated as a single group.”
*In English only – in French apparently it’s “premier ministre” at both levels, for male holders of the offices.
I’ve seen “corflute” but had no idea what it meant. So put me down as another Aussie ignorant of his own language.
“Rort”, yes. It’s not just about politics. Anything that involves “manipulating the system to gain a wrongful advantage” (I copied that from somewhere) is a rort. “Stoush” is also familiar.
On another note, recently I used the word “ding dong” to describe an argument or fight. I was told that only someone of my generation would understand that expression as it’s fallen out of use among the young. Such is life.
recently I used the word “ding dong” to describe an argument or fight. I was told that only someone of my generation would understand that expression as it’s fallen out of use among the young.
I encountered “having an argy-bargy” said by a maybe 19-year-old in a YA book (the author is British) written 10 years ago. My take in the story context was that the character was funning around with an antiquated expression. It looks antiquated – but what do I know about British vernacular ?
I don’t know how in or out “argy-bargy” is in current British and whether it ever was youth slang, but one thing I’ve seen frequently is that outdated youth slang lives on in books for the youth demographic because nobody has told the authors that what they know as youth slang is long past its sell date. German examples are use of terms of approval like knorke in books fom the 60s/70s or astrein in books from the 80s.
knorke ! astrein !! So peinlich, my dears !!!
I don’t think “argy-bargy” is youth slang particularly. I’ve seen it in other British novels.
The English band Squeeze were pretty youthful when they released their album titled _Argybargy_, but that was 45 years ago and they and their generational peers are rather less youthful now. Fun wikipedia anecdote about that album: “Because the titular expression is not used in America, band manager Miles Copeland opposed the album name. Difford recalled, ‘Miles told us no one would know what it meant but we didn’t give a shit and were in a belligerent, young Englishmen’s mood, so we kept it.'”
The late Justice Scalia used the pejoratively-intended phrase “legalistic argle-bargle” in a late-career dissenting opinion. Whether there is an etymological connection between argy[-]bargy and argle-bargle or whether it’s one of those false-friend coincidences is not known to me.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang:
Clearly not youth slang.
The transience of slang was another problem I ran into when thinking about Tolstoy in Northern New Mexico Hispanic Vernacular English. For instance, should the princess say that Napoleon is the Antichrist for real or for reals, or something else?
On “preside”, maybe I can ask here what I should imagine about late Victorian and Edwardian mayors in Berkshire presiding at banquets. Are those city functions, or was the mayor invited to preside at private banquets? Did he tell jokes? Is it possible that any of the banquets were fundraisers? My vague memories of The Mayor of Casterbridge aren’t helping. Of course I’m trying to figure out what dear old Will Whitfoot did once he was fattened up again (and Frodo did as Deputy Mayor and Sam did during his terms [sorry, spoiler]), and maybe how the Shirriffs and Bounders got paid.
It probably helps that “First Minister” was current in Britain in some earlier century or other.
Enough so that there’s now a band named Knorkator.
Particularly strange is what the company that runs the billboards in the subway stations of Berlin does with currently unused billboards: it puts its own ads there, and they say…
Knorke! (giant font)
Diese Werbefläche ist einfach knorke! Gleich buchen! (“This advertisement surface is simply groovy! Book right away!”)
Younger generations will misunderstand it, because, like everything else, it means “penis”.
That’s an obvious development from dong and dingaling, no doubt influenced by further velar-nasal-marked words like wang and schlong.
Reelio trulio?
Younger generations will misunderstand it, because, like everything else, it means “penis”.
I was shamed not long ago into stopping using hoohah for ‘whatsit’, which I had learned (from a woman friend) many years ago.
Well, “donga” in Australia refers to a “temporary, usually transportable, dwelling”. “Donger” is a vulgar word for “penis”. Somehow the two manage to coexist.
@Bathrobe: Rhoticism would seemingly make it easier for those two to coexist, but if they manage without it, so be it.
@David M.: Reelio trulio?
I Nash my teeth at you.
“The Tale of Custard the Dragon”
Aside from possible rhoticity, “donga” has a /g/ but “donger” doesn’t, according to Wiktionary. But Wiktionary also has a second “donger” that means “donga”.
“Donger” is a vulgar word for “penis”.
I can’t recall ever encountering donger or donga in that sense: only dong. Still lacking my wonted access to OED, I consulted SOED and found that it agrees with me: just dong, which in one separate entry means also “a fabulous creature represented as having a luminous nose”, “coined by Edward Lear”. (I hope there’s no connexion.)
Just now I learned yet another cryptic Australian politicism. Discussing cabinet changes after Labor’s record-breaking election win (its biggest majority since federation):
Being one of the six Australian males born without intimate knowledge of football, I had to look it up. Hmmm.
Addition of breaking news (last hour): Sussan Ley has been chosen as Opposition Leader, by colleagues in the shrunken conservative opposition. This is the first time they’ve been led by a woman.
I can’t recall ever encountering donger or donga in that sense:
@N, you need to get out a bit more, cobber. “I’m as dry as a dead dingo’s donger”. A simple google search will find plenty more examples.
Bonus: “I’m as dry as a pommie’s bath mat.” ROFL
“hospital pass” cryptic Australian politicism
Are you even Australian? You do know rugby (in various forms) is the national sport? Where are you going if somebody passes you the ball just as a prop forward is lumbering towards you? That not-atall-cryptic metaphor is used widely in all avenues of life. (And I leave it to @DE to comment on whether the phrase has made it to other rugby-playing nations. I dare say it’s also applicable in the American game. Also Ice Hockey. — oh, I see WikiP says as much; I wrote the above without needing to look it up.)
Green’s entry for donger shows that it’s been around for decades, “orig. Aus.” with a few outlier quotations from the US and UK; Wiktionary labels it “Africa, Australia, British, informal”. Not in my (US) vocabulary personally; it’s in Urban Dictionary, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell where those entries come from geographically.
You can hardly rely on SOED to be au courant with every slang term in the entire Anglosphere. OED’s dong, n.3 ‘penis’ is unrevised from 1972; they don’t yet have donger, I expect they’ll add it when dong is revised.
I hope there’s no connexion.
That 1972 OED entry does actually give the origin of dong, n.3 ‘penis’ as “perh. f. prec.”, where the preceding entry is Dong n.2 with a luminous nose. But most likely that was a goof and by “prec.” they really meant the entry before that, dong n.1, ‘sound of bell; heavy blow’. When SOED entered dong ‘penis’, they said “perh. f. prec.” where the preceding entry was the ‘sound of bell; heavy blow’ one.
But that’s probably not the origin either: the OED *has* recently revised ding, ding-dong, and dingus, and dong sounds like it comes out of that cluster. This sequence seems pretty plausible:
dingus (1866), North American (< Dutch) A thing … whose name the speaker or writer does not know … a ‘thingummy’
dingus (this sense c1890), North American ‘penis’
ding-dong (this sense 1906), originally U.S. ‘penis’
From there you can easily get to dong ‘penis’, which Green’s has from c.1890; you just have to assume ding-dong and dingus are a bit older than the earliest known citations, which is entirely plausible. That leaves about half a century for dong to travel to Australia and get elaborated to donger.
I dare say it’s also applicable in the American game.
I’ve been an American football fan my whole life, and it is not a widely used term among spectators and broadcasters. It makes obvious sense in context if you’re talking about a high forward pass over the middle, but it’s not a part of everyday American speech the way “blitz”, “punt” or “first down” are. I wonder if it even has much currency with modern players. According to Wikipedia, ice hockey players prefer the term “suicide pass”.
Thanks for your adjuncts to the linguistic muse’s diadem, Ktschwarz.
I wouldn’t know one end of a football racquet from the other. I understand that Australians play several variations of the game, but I gave up both attempting to understand and caring at about six years of age. “A goal is worth six points and a behind is worth just one.” That’s about it. As for those enigmatic “field goals”, I’m completely in the dark.
Dong for “penis” is first of all AmE, but it was certainly the version I heard throughout my youth and into adulthood. Of course I mix in more refined circles these days, and like David E I rarely get out.
I don’t say that I’ve never heard donger, but I can’t recall specific instances. I must have seen it when reading the relevant literature in the 1970s: “1971 B. Humphries Bazza Pulls it Off ‘Right now I’m dry as a dead dingo’s donger!’ ” That dated occurrence I found in searches on dong, donga, and donger in The Australian National Dictionary. Sure, dong is there only in the etymology of Australian donger (supposed world-first occurrence was in Australia: “1962 J. Wynnum Tar Dust 46 ‘Me Donger’s bust. It won’t work again’… ‘You’ve probably strained yourself. Didn’t I warn you before you stepped ashore?’ ”). But dong was always the variant we used, in and around Melbourne.
Humphries is responsible for a great number of plausible pseudo-folk constructions that people take as authentic: “spear the bearded clam”, “dry as a nun’s nasty”, “drain the dragon”. I met him briefly in The Olden Days, and he told me virtuoso lies about a proposed sequel to his film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which bore no factual resemblance to the eventual sequel Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.
Like Vanya I cannot recall ever hearing “hospital pass” applied to (American) football, even though when I read the wiki description I sort of understand the concept and why some foreigners might plausibly have applied that label to a comparable phenomenon in their own local dialect of football. I did do some quick googling and some instances of the phrase in a US football context appear to be Out There, but generally in Tiktok or youtube content (which may not even be generated by human beings …) rather than news stories written by actual U.S. sportswriters. Here’s a borderline case from last season where a news story about a particular unfortunate injury uses the phrase, but only because the journalist is quoting some rando on Twitter who used it. Not sure if it’s quotation marks because it’s a direct quote from the tweet or if the quotes are to flag it as an unusual/non-lexicalized phrase, as if to say “so-called hospital pass.” https://apnews.com/article/saints-chris-olave-injury-7843b0e7a835de18273b69def192fc88
Plus it as a situation in which the player in question did, in fact, have to go to the actual hospital, as opposed to one in which there was merely some heightened abstract chance of the possibility, which seems to be the point of the Australian idiom.
My feeling is that in American football, pass receivers are just expected to catch passes when they’re about to get creamed. The league has forbidden certain tackles of players in situations where they’re defenseless (Rule 12, Article 9), and catching a pass is one of the situations named, but from my football-watching days, I don't remember people blaming the passer or the choice of route for the receiver to run.
(Some of the rule changes happened after a notorious case in which a player, Darryl Stingley, was paralyzed for life by a then-legal tackle as he tried to catch a pass.)
Like Vanya I cannot recall ever hearing “hospital pass” applied to (American) football
Same here. I’m not a football fan, but I watched a lot of games as a kid because my father and uncle did, and I still read a fair number of stories in the sports section because they’re there (yes, I used to read cereal boxes). It’s not a US idiom.
I might add that after I looked up “hospital pass”, I remembered that I’d heard it in my ultimate-disc days, but ultimate isn’t a contact sport and I didn’t remember what was called a hospital pass. Apparently it’s a pass that floats down slowly, so several players have a chance to try to catch it or knock it down.
In a small-world connection (not necessarily a “coincidence”), a grandson of the late Darryl Stringley whom Jerry F. mentioned (Derek S., Jr.) earlier this year signed a lucrative new deal with Houston that reportedly makes him the highest-paid (w/o adjusting for inflation, at least) cornerback in NFL history as he prepares for his fourth season in the pros this coming fall. So he’s as it were working the other side of the street from his grandfather, tasked with tackling receivers in the ways that are currently permitted by the rules, or even better preventing them (in the ways that are currently ditto) from catching the ball in the first place.
Noetica, thanks for the link to the Australian National Dictionary! They’ve been promising that for “later this year” since early 2023. This is still marked “beta” and the interface is buggy, but it’s worth the wait. Their judgment is independent of the OED’s: they give the etymology of rort, v. as definitely from wrought, and “unlikely to be related to rorty”.
a player, Darryl Stingley, was paralyzed for life by a then-legal tackle
Contrary to my implicature, Wikipedia says the tackle Jack Tatum made would still be legal.
And now in Australia they’re saying that Sussan Ley (first-ever leader of our conservatives in the federal parliament, as new Opposition Leader) has been led to a “glass cliff”. The intent is suitably clear, even if the metaphor is ill-transferred from “glass ceiling”.
Her name is doubly problematic. Apparently she added an extra “s” long ago, to improve the numerology. As for her surname, her own spokesperson announced that Ms /lei/ had been voted in as leader – and her newly chosen deputy leader used the same pronunciation. But for once our journalists have generally got it right: /ˈsuːzᵊn li:/. Australians are egregiously insouciant about such things, most notably with the names of tennis players.
I haven’t been able to find as much as a picture of Sussan Ley’s ex-husband John Ley from whom she has her surname, much less any indication of the language it comes from. WP.en does give Lee as an alternative version, though, citing this video where she says it herself (published by a conference, so a valid WP source).
So I looked up ley lines to see if I’d been saying that correctly. It does have a diphthong. Seems to be a side form to E lea ~ ‘meadow’, borrowed for esoteric uses by one Albert Watkins (no relation).
It does have a diphthong.
You realize this is utterly ambiguous in this context.
Just looking at wikipedia’s list of notable folks surnamed Ley, most of them are either English or from countries with significant historical English settlement, suggesting that it’s a perfectly cromulent member of the Anglo-Saxon surname inventory. Sussan Ley is not even the only one on the list described as an “Australian politician,” although she may not share this former MP’s distinction of being “widely suspected to have been involved in the deaths of a number of people in Australia, including political rivals” not to mention (after a later-in-life return to England) being “said to have been the wealthiest person ever to be imprisoned at” Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ley
I assume that by “have a diphthong” Lars meant homophonous-with-Lay as opposed to homophonous-with-Lee, since those seem to be the two pronunciation possibilities Out There. I am however separately confused by who it is that Albert Watkins is no relation to?
I assume that by “have a diphthong” Lars meant homophonous-with-Lay as opposed to homophonous-with-Lee, since those seem to be the two pronunciation possibilities Out There.
Except that those are both diphthongs, as Lars presumably knows perfectly well. Also, both those pronunciations are accepted (AHD; the OED also gives both).
Thomas Ley seems to have been a nasty piece of work, but nowhere near the worst Ley of his time.
@languagehat: How do you have a diphthong in “lee”? Isn’t it just /li:/?
I was brought up in the /liy/ tradition, but I guess opinions differ, in which case I withdraw my cavil.
I mean, to me there’s an audible difference between the English vowel and a pure long /i/.
I pronounce “Lee” with the FLEECE vowel, which I frankly don’t naturally think of as a diphthong, although there’s some scholarly contention that it’s a “slight diphthong” or may be a diphthong “depending on dialect.” But the FACE vowel is unambiguously a “full diphthong” in most varieties. In my idiolect the FLEECE vowel feels a bit more diphthongy in closed syllables than open ones, although maybe that varies depending on what consonant ends the closed syllable.
But in a choice between FLEECE and FACE I think it should be fairly obvious (for various Gricean reasons …) to figure out which is being characterized as the diphthong in a statement that seems to assume that only one of them is a diphthong.
Wikipedia’s discussion of Australian phonology asserts that:
The vowel /iː/ of FLEECE has an onset [ɪi̯], except before laterals.[11] The onset is often lowered to [əi], so that beat is [bəit] for some speakers.
But that’s a different diphthongization than what hat was referring to, I think?
No, I think it’s the same. I hadn’t realized, or (more likely) had forgotten, that there was a dispute about the diphthongal nature. I’d say “slight diphthong” is a good characterization.
Geoff Lindsey on Seeing the FLEECE diphthong: “In terms of linking, FLEECE, FACE, PRICE and CHOICE connect to a following vowel with j”, although “Like the other English diphthongs, [FLEECE] may be compressed into a monophthong in running speech.”
There you go.
one additional use of “ding-dong” as a noun that isn’t in the OED: it may be strictly idiolectal, but val garland, as co-host of the british makeup competition show Glow Up, (and followed by some contestants in later seasons) nouns the OED’s “originally and chiefly British” Interjection.2 sense (“to express desire, approval, or excitement”) in response to particularly successful looks: “that’s a ding! dong!” it’s a little ambiguous, but i think the referrent is the accolade itself (“that’s [worthy of, and now receiving] a prize!”) rather than the look (“that’s a medal-winner!”).
Maybe it’s just my obtuseness, but I find Lindsey’s discussion baffling. I grant that if “Lee” was immediately followed by another word that starts with a vowel an audible linking /j/ might manifest itself. But there’s no /j/ as best as I can tell when it’s not followed by another word or followed by a consonant-initial word. Is the claim that the potential /j/ is always hiding there and sometimes it manifests overtly but other times not? Perhaps the problem is that various people discussing what seems like the same issue do not use the same IPA notation and/or have different technical definitions of technical terms and thus may be talking past each other? There are also potentially deep ontological waters about distinctions between a “phoneme” (to some degree an abstraction) and its actual phonetic “realization” lurking here.
@rozele: how closely is that usage related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_a_Ding_Dong_Daddy_from_Dumas. You can say that’s adjectival, but maybe it’s just a noun used as a modifier. (“Noun adjunct” seems to be one label currently in vogue.)
If you hunt up old films, you can actually hear the difference between the pronunciation of the FLEECE vowel in UK RP from the 1940s (when it actually was a monophthong) and now (when it’s a diphthong.)
The modern RP FLEECE vowel is unequivocally a diphthong phonetically (including before a consonant, and including before pause.) Whether you regard it as a diphthong phonemically is a matter of how you choose to analyse the system.
Lots of discussion in this thread, including a YouTube video in which Geoff Lindsey hunted up a few old films and showed that [iː] for FLEECE, not to mention [uː] for GOOSE*, is limited to foreign accents and the strictest definition of RP.
The stuff about “j” has extra complications; the “sciyence” phenomenon is not universal – for example, the accent Lindsey uses to imply that it is lacks it…
* That one has the extra complication that the diphthong is, to some extent, fronted for most people.
@JWB:
i see what you mean about the song, which does so much noun-adjuncting (“ping-pong papa”, “wompus kitty”, and three-layer versions like “corn pone papa” and “peach pie papa”). to my ear, though, “ding dong daddy” feels primarily adjectival, like “big blonde baby” or “hard-hearted baby” – though certainly with the sexual noun sense being invoked implicitly to spice things up (parallel to “honey-dipping daddy”), and maybe the “wildly eccentric” sense too, since it’s a fairly absurdist novelty number.
but val garland’s pretty unequivocal; she doesn’t have another noun in her phrasing. if anything comes after “ding dong”, it’s an address to the person being praised (“that’s a ding! dong!, darling!”). and it’s almost always in a phrase like that with the indirect article to mark it. she does also use it as a pure interjection of praise – i think in the first season or two she did exclusively, and only started nouning that sense later on, in parallel to contestants talking about “getting a ‘ding dong'”.
as an American who is probably less well-traveled than most commenters here, the “corflute” explanation quoted in the post body confused me for a different reason. Repeating it (with emphasis added by me):
This explanation called to mind… well, I call them “yard signs”, but the wikipedia page is under “lawn signs”. Every picture in that wikipedia article is of the kind of political advertisement I pictured — and I would not call this thing a “poster”.
However clicking through to the article helped a lot because of the pictures! Most of them are indeed what I would call “posters” — they are attached to some backing surface rather than freestanding on little stilts. (Well, the “Terri Butler” sign in right of the header image here looks free standing, but it’s still not a typical yard/lawn sign design.)
So I guess I learned that Australia and the US handle their electoral campaign advertising pretty differently, even in the “small temporary sign in your yard/along the road” use case!
(Incidentally — posters are also used in US election campaigns, although their prevalence vs. lawn/yard signs varies a lot from city to city in my experience. My hometown only does yard-signs, so much so that I wonder if posters are banned? I don’t know if the material is similar to corflute — I think i’ve seen various types of plastic, cardboard and paper used for both.)
At least they both have such signs. Over here in west-central Europe, private citizens buying such things and putting them on their property is completely unheard of. All signs are put up by the parties and either tied to lampposts and such or glued to wooden backgrounds of which three form a free-standing triangle, or they’re simply billboards.
(While I’m at it: door-knocking by political campaigns is also unheard of. I was shocked to learn it exists in Britain. Any party that tried this over here would promptly become as unpopular as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.)
@Y
> I was shamed not long ago into stopping using hoohah for ‘whatsit’, which I had learned (from a woman friend) many years ago.
Gravity Falls got away with an owl animatronic named Hoo-Ha in 2014, but they had to fight Disney S&P to keep it in, as Alex Hirsch noted in a video from 2022 that went viral.
It’s possible that it’s gotten more profane since then? I honestly can’t remember if I’ve seen the word used recently. And in my social circles -ussy is an extremely productive suffix so I’m not sure I’d be able to tell it’s level of acceptability in “regular” society even if I did hear it used.
@David Marjanović — interesting! Sounds much nicer, tbh. Though I know those public-area posters and billboards can get pretty cluttered up as well…
At least I haven’t actually had to deal with any door-to-door campaigners since I moved out of my parents house — perks of apartment living I guess 😛 [I did get invited to a door-to-door campaign for the last POTUS election. I considered it because I wanted an excuse to hang out with the friends who invited me, but ultimately my distaste for talking to strangers face-to-face won out.]
Also somehow I’m less surprised that Europe doesn’t do this at all. Maybe that’s the narcissism of small differences in action.
(Although, if I may ask, have you seen people put up flags of Ukraine or Palestine in their windows/on their houses?? Because I vaguely had the impression that was a thing in Europe, and it’s an extension of the same sort of political behavior here, or at least I think it is — a midpoint would be Black Lives Mater yard signs like this which I still see pretty often in my area.)
@David M.: private citizens don’t typically “buy” such things in the U.S. The candidates’ campaigns pay to have them printed up (along with the hardware to get them stuck into the dirt in a stable fashion) and are very happy to distribute them gratis to any/all private citizens who appear willing to erect them on their own property in support of the campaign. Obviously “yard signs” (what I would call them) are more common in places where people have their own front yards along the streets, meaning not your more intensely-urban neighborhoods. Where I live yard signs also get erected by campaign workers on publicly owned land, like median strips in highways and so on. There is some set of cultural understandings/norms which may or may not be completely embodied in formal law governing: a) each side’s right to a “fair share” of such public locations for its signs; b) taboos against taking down the other side’s signs; and c) both sides’ obligation to go back and remove their signs promptly after the day of the election.
You sometimes get these for other things submitted to public vote. Right now in my town there is a modest sprinkling of yard signs urging a “yes” vote on various propositions being voted on next week to authorize the school district to borrow $X million for various capital projects; I have not seen any organized “no” signs on that issue, but maybe some will sprout at the last minute.
The Trackback link adds another level of confusion for me on “corflute”:
I’ve never heard the term coroplast at all, despite occasionally dealing with applications of the material (mostly non-political promotional signs.)
Despite the Leave example in the wikipedia article, personal political posters here are almost always made of paper and stuck to the inside of your window. I don’t think anyone buys them rather than is given them, but I’ve never obtained one, so I don’t know.
Slightly relatedly, it’s quite common here still to see stickers or posters just saying ‘Yes’. Anyone who was around in 2014 knows what it means, but I can’t help wondering if there are now people who don’t.
But apparently even in Wales, ‘Yes‘ written in that particular font means ‘in favour of independence’ without needing to spell it out – I found that an interesting extension, because it’s so recognisably the Scottish logo.
“The most cursed suffix in the 21st century” had escaped me.
Yes; it’s rare, though. Pride flags may be a bit more common.
Or buttons on clothing. I also saw “Yes2” in… maybe it was 2016 (the second and so far last time I was in Scotland; the first was just before Indyref).
oh yeah, J.W. Brewer’s points are also correct in my part of the country. Though I think people are probably buying the Black Lives Matter signs themselves, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were giveaways when the movement was at its peak.
(Campaigns aren’t great about taking down either yard signs or posters when the election is finished… but this is a city with a lot of litter anyways, maybe they feel it makes no difference.)
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen yard signs stuck in concrete planters on public walks with no road verge (more vocabulary confusion: none of the terminology suggested on that page sounds right to me, even the ones supposedly from my region) — and also windowboxes of houses/apartments with no lawn!
> “The most cursed suffix in the 21st century” had escaped me.
I *wish* it had escaped me. I’m not particularly offended/discomforted (I’ve been inured from overuse) but I’ll be happier when it’s passed on from current slang.
It might be especially popular on Tumblr? Maybe I need to stop making IRL friends through Tumblr…
Door-knocking is most certainly a thing here in the UK. Being myself an insight-free zone, I rather enjoy doing it. Much preferable to just posting party leaflets, which gets very dull very quickly (though it gives you a new respect for postpersons.) Also I am not shy of talking to strangers, after a lifetime of practice at work.
Outright hostile receptions are surprisingly uncommon, though sheepish excuses are popular about being in the middle of some vaguely specified yet vital activity one needs to get straight back to.
A lot of people are actually quite keen to have the opportunity to tell you what they think of your party’s shortcomings (or even virtues.) The main trick one has to learn is when to shut up (never easy for political activists.) People often have interesting things to say.
The main complaint about the actual visitation habit itself is actually not “why are you annoying me?” but “why do we only see you doing this when there’s an election on?”
A depressing number of older people just seem glad to have someone to talk to at all.
Whether it does much in the way of swinging votes is not obvious. You don’t change many people’s minds, for sure (though it does happen.) The main idea is to encourage people who are already fairly well disposed to your party to actually vote. I suspect that the main benefit is ensuring that party activists don’t get too divorced from what normal people are thinking.
The trap that novices fall into is to get involved in long political discussions on the doorstep when you encounter people with a similar wonkish outlook to yourself. Actual candidates are also prone to do this, and may have to be prised away by helpful co-canvassers for their own good.
Window posters and garden stakes are popular during elections. The parties provide them, though. No individual creations to speak of …
@Noetica: “Still lacking my wonted access to OED,”
If you have a reader’s card to The National Library of Australia, you should be able to view the third edition of The Oxford English Dictionary either by putting https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/421799 into your search bar or by logging into the library’s website and searching for that edition by its name: OED : Oxford English dictionary : the historical English dictionary [electronic resource].
have you seen people put up flags of Ukraine or Palestine in their windows/on their houses??
In NZ, Ukraine yes, Palestine I’ve not seen. About three weeks ago there was a rash of Irish Republic flags (presumably to mark the 24 April proclamation).
There’s a Māori National flag, also a United Tribes of Aotearoa [see same link]. Those have been particularly prominent since the 2015-2016 flag referendum, which was a rather half-hearted attempt to overthrow the cultural cringe of bearing the Union Jack (and being almost indistinguishable from the Aus flag).
a new respect for postpersons
Ah yes, the eagerly anticipated transhumans. So far I’ve only seen corflutes of them, but if AI has already reached that stage in the UK I’m sure we’ll have them here within the eighteenmonth.
M:
If you have a reader’s card to The National Library of Australia, …
Thanks. Not that urgent, really. I was getting access to a wealth of onliniana through my vestigial connexion, now withered, with a university. I’m about to be blessed with a minor honorary research-oriented position, so all’s well.
I’ve always liked SOED by the way, but the latest (last?) CD-ROM version of it is braindead compared to the wonderful version I had that worked on early versions of Windows XP. That was a linguistic resource and a half, enabling far more sophisticated searches than can be done on OED.
About three weeks ago there was a rash of Irish Republic flags (presumably to mark the 24 April proclamation).
The Easter Monday proclamation. It happened to fall on 24 April in 1916, and on 18 April in 1949, when the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force, and on 21 April in 2025.
Nationalists commemorate the 1916 event, but not the 1949 one, on Easter Monday. The 1949 date was itself a commemoration of 1916, and thus both events might henceforth have been bundled into a single commemoration (cf. 5 November 1605/1688, 29 May 1630/1660, 12 July 1690OS/1691NS) but this has not in fact happened. More at 75 years on, should Ireland have a Republic Day?
@mollymooly
Given the continuing legal status of the 6 counties and the vocal Republicans living there (maybe also the quiet ones), this might be a wee bit premature. One might as well ask, why is the Bundestag/bahn/post not the Reichstag/bahn/post and why has the German national anthem been shortened?
@JWB, from my experience, processing of what you hear (speech if not all sounds…) does involves something taht amounts to hallucinations.
That is : we are not dealing with a direct mapping of waves to an analogous model of actual waves in our minds which we then abstract away from (and jump to discrete phonemes) normally but which we access and analyse whenever we want if not with arbitrary precision then with some “blurring”, but without glitches and artefacts, and which is precisely that thing which we percieve as “actual sound [rather than a sequence of segments], no different in nature from all sounds”.
The model I access when listening attentively and which I percieve as “the actual” sound is something heavily processed and prone to glitches. Sometimes (very rarely) this makes my jaw drop.
E.g. when I was listening to a Belgian football player. I listened to some word many times and kept hearing an uniform “sh”. Then I recognised the word and instead of “sh” I heard “s-kh”, two sounds. I dropped my jaw because it happened to what I believed to be “actual sound, no different from that of rain”.
Confusingly, the building is still called Reichstag; the people who meet in it form the Bundestag.
No one compelled the Bundestag to decide to relocate to the derelict Reichstag building or for that matter to Berlin, the symbol of the 1871 version of unification as contrasted with the failed 1848 version of unification.* Although maybe the blame should fairly lie on the Soviets for only partially rather than completely destroying the old building?
*A version that was supposedly quote unquote liberal, for a value of liberalism that still included lots of voelkisch ideology and romanticization of warfare.
“Returning” to Berlin promptly became a symbol of reunification, of not being limited to the West anymore; all cabinet departments moved to Berlin as well (though that took a long time), and so did the president. Symbols of federalism continue to exist outside the core of executive and legislative power: the constitution court has remained in Karlsruhe, the federal bank (now the European Central Bank) in Frankfurt am Main, and the database of who got how many points deducted from their driver’s license in Flensburg. (You lose the license if all points have been deducted.)
I certainly understand the symbolic appeal of a reunited Berlin and how the division of Berlin was a synecdoche of the division of Germany as a whole. But Berlin has symbolized and continues to symbolize a lot of other things too. I guess maybe Weimar (perfectly nice place …) might have had bad vibes as a new capital if you wanted to have one in the former DDR. It could have been Leipzig, which is plausibly where the most immediate causal chain of events that led to the collapse of the DDR began. Or a Greater Lübeck incorporating the territory across the river that had been in the DDR. Anything that symbolized an exorcism of the DDR without a necromantic revival of the Hohenzollern legacy. (Flensburg was stolen by Bismarck from the Danes and should be retroceded/disgorged – maybe one could rally grassroots support if there was a deal that Germans with bad driving records would get a clean slate because the records would be lost during the transition?)
IIRC, returning the capital to Berlin in case of a reunification of Germany was stipulated in the Basic Law, and officially Berlin was seen as the capital in waiting that temporarily couldn’t be realized due to the division and Berlin’s special status. In the early years after the war, they even convened the Federal Assembly that elects the president in Berlin.
Now, the law setting up the Bundesbank (National Bank) also stipulated that it was to move to Berlin in that case and that law was changed to keep the Bundesbank in Frankfurt, so perhaps they could have abolished that stipulation in the Basic Law as well, but the divided Berlin had become such a symbol by that time that it was basically unthinkable to put the capital elsewhere. Those against it were on one hand the usual naysayers who didn’t like the reunification per se, plus some Bonners who wanted to keep the capital. (Bonn still has a special status as “Federal City” and four ministries and some other Federal institutions have their seat here.)
Re Flensburg: I know the war is known as Prussian-Danish war in the English speaking world, but here in Germany it’s known as the German-Danish war. Besides Prussia, Austria also fought against Denmark, and occupied Holstein for three years until the Austrian-Prussian war of 1866. Schleswig had a plebiscite on returning to Denmark after WWI, in two zones; the Southern zone voted to stay German, the Northern zone to return to Denmark, which was what happened. That plebiscite reflected the facts on the ground, and even the Nazis didn’t take back North Schleswig. So, besides enthusiasts for getting rid of the Kraftfahtbundesamt, you won’t find many takers for your proposal.
FWIW, the original 1949 version of the BRD’s Grundgesetz (available online in both German and “official” English translation) says nothing about Berlin as the capital, either real or aspirational, and in fact says nothing at all about a capital city, presumably leaving that to legislative discretion. By contrast the 1949 constitution of the sogenannte DDR does explicitly claim Berlin as capital.
But the Grundgesetz has post-1949 been amended dozens of times, both before and after the expansion of the BRD at the DDR’s expense, and I can’t figure out (w/o spending more than the cursory amount of time I have …) when the current language about Berlin as capital was added and/or some placeholder predecessor language on that subject was first added.
As to Flensburg, the results of the 1920 plebiscite(s) reflected the long-term impact of what some folks call “settler colonialism” on the demographic makeup and political loyalties of the local population, which had shifted during the over-half-century during which the city had been incorporated into Prussia. (Following the next war, of course, no one asked the ethnic-German population of e.g. Silesia to vote on who they thought should rule Silesia – the Communists just ethnically cleansed them from the territory.)
Re Berlin in the Basic Law, I may well be misremembering stuff I was taught back in school.
My point re Flensburg was that the question was settled between Denmark and Germany after WWI to mutual satisfaction and I don’t see any appetite on either side of the border to re-open it.
In Holstein, the Danes tried for a while to settle the area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire. The counts of Schauenburg and Holstein had obtained properties on either side of the German-Danish border,* and when their line became extinct, the Danish fief (the duchy of Schleswig) reverted to the king. At the time, the local elites in Holstein wanted the two states to continue to be governed together. So the Danish king was granted Holstein as well, even though it was overwhelming German. Various Danish regimes tried to Dane-ify Holstein, but settling Danes farther south was only encouraged intermittently and half-heartedly. So Holstein never lost its strongly German identity, and it was easy pickings when the Prussians (and Austrians) decided to steal it.
* Like how the Valois Burgundians had the duchy of Burgundy that was a fief of France and the adjacent county of Burgundy that was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire. After the Burgundian Wars, the French crown seized the duchy from Mary the Rich, but the county stayed with the Hapsburgs until the end of Spain’s golden age, forming a major portion of the Spanish Road.
World War 2 was followed by fairly dramatic westward movement of Germany’s eastern borders but not by comparably significant movement of Germany’s western borders — not because none of Germany’s Western neighbors had no ambitions for annexation, but because the US & UK both thought it was probably a bad idea and it was easier for them to put the kibosh on e.g. the ambitious Dutch “Bakker Schut” plan for expansion and ethnic cleansing than it was for them to not just let Stalin have his way in the East. In the event, the Benelux countries collectively got only a few hundred square kilometers of trivial adjustments, and they sold most of that land back to the BRD around 15 years later once the BRD was rich enough to pay ransom for it. Even the French only got a do-over of the post-WW1 thing where they again got temporary control of the Saar but again eventually failed to convert that into permanent control. I could not in two or three minutes googling find out whether Denmark as of 1945 might have harbored similar ambitions to move its border southward that got squelched by the Powers, or was too polite to even think of raising the issue.
The Danish government of May 1945 was very clear that the border was not to be moved. There was an effort by some opposition politicians to revive the campaign for Denmark to the Eider, but it got little popular support.
the “everybody move over one” principle stopped at the rhine (like so many things) – to my eye at least partly because the post-WWII settlement was basically a continuation of the post-WWI settlement, cleaning up the messiness of the results of the various imperial-aftermath wars and civil wars into Proper Modern Nation-States.
Me: The Danish government of May 1945 was very clear that the border was not to be moved. There was an effort by some opposition politicians to revive the campaign for Denmark to the Eider, but it got little popular support.
Having checked my own claims, I should add that those opposition politicians were a fringe minority. I also learn that there may have been less appetite for moving the border after WW2 because the Danish minority in German Schleswig was perceived as sympathetic to the Nazi regime. I have no clear opinion on the factual basis of that perception.
(WP claims that this may have to do with the “Aryan” Pan-Germanic ideology of the Nazis being seen as less threatening than the German ethno-nationalism of the preceding century.)
(… but also, it wouldn’t be surprising if a minority facing a genocidal regime would maneuver by exploiting their similarity to the stated ideals of the regime.)
Belated thank you for answers about political statement flags in Europe and NZ! I have no particular response but it’s interesting to hear!
Thanks also @David Eddyshaw for the personal account of door-knocking, I’ll keep in mind that if I get invited again.
> the 2015-2016 flag referendum, which was a rather half-hearted attempt to overthrow the cultural cringe of bearing the Union Jack (and being almost indistinguishable from the Aus flag).
Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me of that! Maybe it was half-hearted locally but I really enjoyed following it on the internet 😛 (although unlike Lucy Gray, I thought the Serious Candidates look pretty cool — not that my opinions matters ofc)
Minnesota did a (successful) flag redesign competition just a few years ago and that one was fun too! I enjoyed both the serious submissions and the less serious ones.
(although my favorite joke one isn’t included in that set — it’s still a play on the California flag, but instead of low-effort trolling it edited the text to actually say “Minnesota Republic” and replaced the bear with a giant mosquito.)
And the ancient treaty that said, in the original Low German, that the two states were ewich tosam ende ongedeld “eternally together and undivided” has been respected in that the current border goes through Schleswig, not between Schleswig and Holstein.
Nothing against loons, but I love that.
The whole 1920 thing was in my grandparents’ time, and they were probably not even old enough to vote. But I’ve been told that there was a feeling that the then government could have done more to get Flensburg included in the zone that eventually voted to join Denmark.
I just located a book on my Mom’s shelves that was published on the occasion of the 2020 centenary of “the reunification” as it’s called here. (Genforeningen). I also have the memoirs of a cousin thrice removed or something like that who was a girl during the last decades of the German possession of the northern zone of Schleswig. I don’t have time to study them now, but I’ll post any tidbits I find.
Actually there was a bona fide constitutional crisis in Denmark in 1920 where the King (Chr. X) dismissed the prime minister over his unwillingness to press for an “independent zone II” at the WWI peace talks which would have prevented the (future) Weimar Republic from having sovereignty over Flensburg. (The constitution, on its face, allowed the dismissal, but since a period from 1885 to 1894 where the King used his powers to allow a minority government to stay in power by signing provisional laws, there was an understanding that the King would be more hands-off).
We learned about the “Easter crisis” in school, but nobody explained the issues involved, and I never did the counting on my fingers to realize that Easter of 1920 was between the plebiscites and the formal accession. (With a provisional government of French and British military, which actually issued postage stamps. Those must be rare…)
1920 Flensburg Germany Occupation Plebiscite Vote Stamps Cover Full Set
$125.00
Schleswig, plebiscite (1920)
(scroll down to Stamps)
The Sydslesvigsk Vælgerforening (in the majority language Südschleswigscher Wählerverband) does presently hold one seat in the Bundestag but for better or worse the most recent election was not quite inconclusive enough to give the SSV’s single seat controlling leverage over who would or would not be able to form a governing coalition. (Wikipedia claims the SSV also tries to court Frisian minority interests, sub nom Söödschlaswiksche Wäälerferbånd, which seems like it would be a very expediency-driven sort of ad hoc coalition.)
I am reminded of one of my favorite 19th-century historical anecdotes, although actual historicity is not guaranteed. Supposedly Bismarck was asked perhaps 25 or 30 years after the fact to explain the actual details of the controversy over Schleswig-Holstein that had served as the pretext for war in 1864. “Ach,” said the aged Chancellor. “There were only three statesmen in Europe who ever really understood that. One is now dead. Another has gone mad. And I have forgotten.”
Well, there was a Frisian-speaking minority in Nordslesvig too, at least earlier, but they didn’t seem to figure independently in the infighting leading up to the plebiscite. My source doesn’t say much about it, but I found this about great power maneouvering before the time when the duchies were in personal union with Denmark (before 1864):
This is from Hans Schultz Hansen, Genforeningen, Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2020, page 13 (Published under the aegis of the project 100 Danmarkshistorier with the support of A.P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal).
IIRC, it’s actually the first time that the SSW has made it into the Bundestag, normally they don’t get enough votes. As the party of an ethnic minority, they’re not affected by the 5% minimum hurdle that applies to other parties*), but they still need to get enough votes to win a seat. But they regularly are represented in the state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein and have held the balance of power there before.
*) That’s why they go for the Frisian vote – it’s the only possibility to widen their voter base without stopping to be an ethnic minority party and having the 5% hurdle applied to them.
@J. W. Brewer: Here’s another version.
@J.W. Brewer: Usually, that quote is attributed to Lord Palmerston, who was the leading figure in British foreign policy in the decades leading up to the Second Schleswig War.
Brett’s link is better than mine. And anyone who loves historical anecdotes or sausage…
I suppose Bismarck would not needed to have actually understood the casus belli in order to take advantage of it.
There was an attempt to impose a common constitution for Denmark, Schleswig and Holstein, but the resistance was large and brought Prussia and Austria into the fight. I don’t know if there was a formal declaration of war, but that was the casus belli if anything.
A bit later there was an Austro-Prussian war where possessions in the duchies were one of the issues, and the Nordschleswiger successfully appealed to Emperor Napoleon (III) to get a paragraph 5 in the Peace of Prague that was to guarantee a plebiscite. Prussia made that a dead letter when the German Empire was created, but it was still being referred to after WWI. (According to loc. cit.).
Sue Butler is another Australian lexicographer who endorses “wrought” as the origin for “rort”; further details in The Feel of a Word: rort (I’ve recently subscribed to her feed).