Opinion
Be honest, how often have you Donald Ducked? Back when Zooming was the norm, I reckon most of us did. If not buck-naked below the waist, then you wore your favourite pyjama bottoms at least, or tracky dacks beneath a presentable dress, an ironed shirt: something of a Clayton’s Donald Duck.
As a verb, the Disney character means to wear a top without pants – nautical cap optional. Coined in the COVID era, the verb honours Mickey’s mate who saved a fortune in needing just half a wardrobe. Unnerving when you think about it, that panel of colleagues on your screen, each the picture of presentability until a certain duck waddles into mind.
The slang is one mere morsel of the 366 words delivered by Susie Dent, the Oxford lexicographer and Channel 4’s Countdown queen, her new book an alphabetical almanac called Words For Life (John Murray, 2025). Strung across the calendar, the glossary visits Dent’s pet terms, the juiciest etymologies, or exotic words filling gaps in English.
Words like dorstokkmila, Norwegian for the daunting first step that begins any marathon task. Or seijaku – Japanese for tranquillity, though more in the sense of finding that calm within a day’s frenzy. Akin to the Icelandic solarfri: a day so perfect that a holiday is necessary, like this April weather demanding an amnesty from all Zoom calls. Or estrenar in Spanish: to step out in new clothes (just as soon as you put some pants on).
Fusions also lace the collection, including jein (the German yeah-nah), humusk (the vegetal perfume of autumn) and hepeat – a devious offshoot of mansplain coined by US physics professor Nicole Gugliucci. While I don’t dare speak for Nicole, I can only presume the so-called Dons among her fellow dons might have stolen kudos for amplifying a female’s opinion in a basso-alpha voice.
As a verb, the Disney character means to wear a top without pants – nautical cap optional.
As for derivation surprises, did you know the T in “to a T” relates to I, or J, rather than T? The phrase’s roots trace back to iota, the Greek letter synonymous with smidgen. In Roman forums this evolved into jot, where the little dot above the lower-case j is a tittle, downsized to T. Hence a buff knows everything down to a tittle (the least detail), just as a buff derives from the leather jackets – buff in colour – worn by crews of Brooklyn’s Fire Department, back in the 1870s.
Sleaze is another shock, the insult evoking the shiny fabrics produced by the Polish city of Silesia. Not to be confused by beggar’s velvet, the elegant nickname for the downy particles that accumulate under furniture, what modern homemakers know as dust bunnies.
Picking my own faves from the volume is a fool’s errand. Though I loved marriage music, Elizabethan idiom for the squall of newborns. Plus olf, a scientific measure devised by Danish professor Ole Fanger to calibrate the smell of a wet dog, and other complex aromas.
Another gem is the flapper slang of “eight minutes” to describe a hard-boiled customer, or Dent’s own darling in respair, meaning to find fresh hope, to shed despair. Or said another way, to escape the doomscroll spiral of the modern news cycle. Surely a medicine we seek in days like these.
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.From our partners
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