For example, what has always been called “mail” (i.e. what comes in stamped envelopes to a street or postbox address), is now fondly known as snail mail – since its electronic equivalent (email) arrives only seconds after being dispatched.

The type of “planes” that transport people and goods to country towns are now "propeller planes", because of the widespread use of smaller and faster jet planes.

A puzzling retronym for non-musicians is "acoustic guitar"; do some guitars not produce “acoustic” sounds?  

It is a retronym to distinguish the traditional instrument from the modern "electric guitar", which amplifies sound electronically.

A similar kind of formation is the term "non-binary", on record since 1995 according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The term "non-binary" reflects the spectrum of human gender identities that is not simply man or woman, in line with changing social understandings.  

Retronyms can even be acronyms, for example ICE, used to refer to cars with conventional "internal combustion engines", as opposed to EVs – the initialism for the increasingly common electric vehicles.

Thus, changing technologies and social evolution can be expected to prompt the use of retronyms.

We can also expect retronyms as phrases and acronyms to be bulkier than the straightforward terms they replace.

Emeritus Professor Pam Peters is a researcher with the linguistics department at Macquarie University.

The term anthropocene was first coined in 2000 to designate the period of primarily human influence on the Earth’s ecosystems.

More recently, earth scientist Stephen Pyne has suggested pyrocene as a more appropriate label, focusing on the element that causes environmental change (‘fire’, from the Greek word pur) in the same way as we talk about the Ice Age(s).

Nomenclature for geological time is generally rather slippery. For example, I’ve already misused the word ‘era’ which in this context refers to hundreds of millions of years (second only to the ‘eon’ in longevity).

More correctly, the pyrocene might be an ‘epoch’, or an ‘age’ – the shortest of these time units.

The traditional name for our current epoch is holocene, literally ‘completely new’, which isn’t a very forward-thinking choice.

Then again, other period terms like ‘Cambrian’ and ‘Jurassic’ connect them with particular regions where evidence for relevant dating was first found, which seems over-specific.

Despite human existence being virtually irrelevant in the overall timeframe of the Earth, we can’t help but impose our perspective when describing it.

Rather it’s a marriage maintained over a long distance (tele- as in telephone).

Telegamy would of course have been the lot of many couples in previous eras and with the jet age of travel, telegamy became the modus operandi for couples with lucrative and/or meaningful jobs based in countries oceans apart from each other.

It had worked on smaller scale in the 1940s for British academics Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, who were inclined to say that they practised telegamy, while she worked at Oxford and he at Cambridge.

To call it telegamy was a slight exaggeration, according to Elizabeth’s biographer (Jenny Teichman), since they got together at weekends and during university vacations, had seven children, and collaborated on three philosophical monographs.

Telegamy has yet to be registered in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it will present
some definitional challenges – how far apart do the couple have to live, and how continuously, for it
to count as telegamy?

Of course there’s now a new word for this type of academic dishonesty – AIgiarism (AI-assisted plagiarism), coined by American venture capitalist Paul Graham according to an article in the Guardian.

There doesn’t seem to have been significant uptake of the term so far, perhaps because of its typographic ambiguity.

The ‘AI’ at the start could easily be read as an ‘A’ followed by a lowercase ‘l’, and in fact one Indian source, The News Minute, does just that – reinterpreting it in the process as ‘algorithmic plagiarism’.

And even if we retain the ‘A’ and ‘I’ of ‘artificial intelligence’, should we be pronouncing them as separate letters, or as a diphthong to rhyme with the first ‘a’ in plagiarism?

The word plagiarism itself has an interesting origin, being derived from the Latin word for ‘kidnapper’.

Perhaps a sizable ransom will need to be paid to allow AIgiarism to retrieve its original identity. Or perhaps we’ll just need to think of a new word that is less open to manipulation.

Dr Adam Smith is the convenor of the Editing and Electronic Publishing Program at Macquarie University.

So those which the dictionary notes as “origin unknown” are a challenge –especially colloquial words like munted, which seems to pop up in New Zealand out of nowhere.

It’s first recorded in New Zealand in 1996 in the sense “damaged, ruined”, as applied to objects or institutions (e.g. a bicycle or the education system “is totally munted”), or to human exhaustion (“I’m munted”).

The latter sense overlaps with fringe usage to mean “intoxicated by alcohol or drugs”, and with British slang muntered meaning “drunk” (documented respectively in 1997 and 1998). 

Munted later hit the headlines worldwide with the disastrous Christchurch earthquake (2010) and the trials of that “munted city”, reported along with Prince William’s visit and his acquisition of munted in the sense “ruined”.

He liked it, and with royal endorsement (!) its use has increased steadily in regular news reporting (from 2010 to 2023), as evidenced by the multi-billion-word NOW corpus.

Its level of usage is still much higher in New Zealand than Australian media (ratio about 3:1), which would explain why it is less familiar to Australians.

Meanwhile in New Zealand English it has extended its grammatical role to become an active verb, in examples like “She munted her toe” and “This predatory government has munted the country”.

Whatever its origins, munted is making its own history in the southern hemisphere. 

Emeritus Professor Pam Peters is a researcher with the Macquarie University Linguistics Department.

A word now gaining currency that has been around for a while, at least for whalers and glaciologists, is calving – the process whereby a glacier or iceberg throws off a mass of ice.

It’s a deeply resonant usage that portrays the large mass of ice as somehow animate, giving birth to its offspring like a cow, or indeed a whale – that other giant of the Arctic oceans that may well have inspired this use of the word.

There is another verb with the same form in English that has a different origin, but an apt sense. Calve appears in various British English dialects, particularly that of Lincolnshire, meaning ‘To fall in as an undermined bank or side of a cutting’ (OED online).

Its origin is uncertain, perhaps related to cave or a Dutch verb, af-kalven, but its connotations of destruction and collapse seem more appropriate to the ever-increasing melting events.

They are signs of a looming disaster, rather than metaphors for renewal as implied by the more familiar word. But perhaps we need to retain these positive undercurrents of meaning, to help conceptualise our environment as a living entity capable of survival and rebirth.

Dr Adam Smith is the convenor of the Editing and Electronic Publishing program at Macquarie University.

The growth of esports can be traced from South Korea, with the founding of the Korean e-Sports Association in 2000 to promote and regulate them.

Professional esportsmen emerged along with live-streaming of competitive games, and audiences grew steadily in Asia as well as Europe and the Americas. Tournaments proliferated with ever-bigger prizes to be won.

Inter-university competitions in the US helped to raise the status of esports, prompting some universities to offer scholarships to skilled esports players as college-level athletes.

But do esports really count as a sport by Olympic criteria? Where does physical fitness come in? Would its players prepare and train for an Olympic games with the same intensity as for other long-recognized sports?

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was also concerned about the violence embedded in esports and the focus on killing opponents. It prompted a new wave of esports based on real sports and virtual reality, including five that formed the Olympic Virtual Series in the countdown to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics: baseball, cycling, rowing, sailing and motorsport.

A head of “virtual sport” was appointed to the IOC in January 2022 to oversee the Virtual Series, though the IOC still considered it premature to hold esports as medal events in the 2024 Olympics.

At least it has supported a less violent genre of video games.

Written by Emeritus Professor Pam Peters, researcher with Macquarie University’s Linguistics Department.

It’s a combination of holist(ic), as in holistic medicine, and (an)orexia which literally means “lack of desire or appetite”.

Holistorexia is a mental illness where the sufferer has an extreme obsession with their wellness, an overwhelming desire to find holistic cures for their physical or mental ills. This might involve becoming overly dependent on practices like yoga and meditation, or subscribing to fad diets and alternative therapies to the point where they adversely affect one’s health.

It’s not dissimilar to orthorexia – a fixation with eating healthy food – and the same suffix is found in other recognised conditions such as dysorexia, parorexia and even bigorexia. This last example is also known as muscle dysmorphia, an excessive concern with being big and muscular.

You won’t find holistorexia being used very often, perhaps because the word is so unwieldy, or perhaps because not many people believe it to be a genuine condition.

It’s quite possible that the term will be as short-lived as some of the activities it refers to, and the world will move on to a new -orexia.

Written by Dr Adam Smith, convenor of the Editing and Electronic Publishing program at Macquarie University

It was coined some years before by an Australian non-profit suicide prevention organisation (in 2009) which holds an annual R U OK? Day in September. Perfect for text-messaging, it’s widely used as a digital greeting.

The letter U itself has a long history of representing “you” in IOU, first recorded in the 1600s. But its uses for “you” in standard English are greatly outnumbered by scores of other words that it represents in contemporary English. Think of it standing for “united” in the initialisms for countries such as UK, USA, UAR and organisations such as the UN and UAP, and for “universal” in USB and UTC. It’s code for “ultra” in UHF, UHT, UV, and for “upper-(class)” in U and non-U alternatives such as “napkin” and “serviette”.

In some compounds it represents the shape of the letter, as in the “U-shaped” valleys of glacier-scraped landscapes, and in the “U-bend” pipe in the bathroom. Its most unusual use is in “utopia”, the title of Thomas More’s celebrated satire, first translated into English in 1551, 16 years after his execution.

The U of More’s Utopia represents a little-known negative Greek prefix ou-, so as to show the perfect society he described didn’t exist anywhere. So much for the thought that Utopia might be the place for you and everyone.

Written by Emeritus Professor Pam Peters, researcher with Macquarie University’s Linguistics Department.

One of the more recent trends to have taken off is the dance move known as a glitch. Glitching involves the dancer making quick, staccato movements that makes them appear to be malfunctioning, like a machine.

This idea of some kind of technical hitch is the most common use of the word, originally applied to fluctuations in electrical signals and popularised by accounts of the US space program in the 1960s.

According to www.etymonline.com, glitch has older origins, perhaps deriving from Yiddish glitsh (a slip), and was a part of radio broadcast jargon.

Linguist Ben Zimmer writes in his Wall Street Journal column (1.11.2013) that glitch was used in this context both by technicians and announcers, to refer to human as well as machine error.

A word that blends the role of people and gadgets like this seems highly appropriate for an age when our existence is so bound up in our mobile devices.

When we glitch on TikTok we become, in a way, the ghosts in our machines.

Written by Dr Adam Smith, convenor of the Editing and Electronic Publishing Program at Macquarie University.