A recent blog entry for Cambridge Dictionaries Online (June 23, 2014) recorded a new use of the word creeping to mean “secretly viewing online information about someone”. This usage combines the idea of stealth behind the verb to creep with the suggestion that someone who does ...

Recruiters share their secrets. By Dallas Bastian. When it comes to applying for a position as a lecturer or academic in a university, handing in a standard CV is not enough to land a job, experts in recruitment say. In this ...

Despite different spellings, scull and skull can express the same meaning when – as verbs – they take a beer or two as their grammatical object. They are variants of skol, the Scandinavian toast used by English-speaking drinkers everywhere who ...

Universities need to change the way they prepare higher-education teachers for the classroom. By Kelly Matthews. In higher education, the default modus operandi has been, “You know the discipline content, you were a good student so you know how to ...

Barely hours after the 2014 Oscars ceremony had finished, online headlines were touting its most gifable, or GIF-Able moments. The word refers to the image file format GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) which was originally created as a means of exchanging ...

An article on a recent Australian by-election reported that corflutes associated with one of the candidates had been defaced.  The captioned photo alongside showed the dismayed candidate  looking at the altered portraits of himself with moustache and heavy spectacles on a set ...

One of the favourite pastimes of fans of a TV or book series is to imagine beloved characters as a romantic couple. For example, Harry Potter and Hermione seemed a natural pairing as they grew to maturity, only for JK ...

Hipster and hippie/hippy both owe their existence to the older adjective hip/hep meaning “smart”, in its twin senses of “street-wise” and “stylish”.  But the Oxford English Dictionary online notes that the 1976 record for all three entries is currently being ...

Macquarie University’s John Croucher stands out by making math and statistics relevant and fun. By Dallas Bastian. Becoming a teacher was the last thing professor John Croucher wanted to do, thanks to a bad stammer that kept him from speaking ...

The comparison of a Danish concept with its Australian counterpart shows how much seemingly similar training concepts can vary. Don’t let the names fool you.  By Mary Leahy The terms may be similar but the Danish idea of kompetence, or ...