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On the slippery slope with rorters and fraudsters

Inside Language | Linguist Kate Burridge talks to Peter Clarke about how a jolly old time became the province of fraudsters and other dubious characters

Kate Burridge & Peter Clarke 8 January 2016 33 words

Rorty times: “Drinking Party at Bob Sawyer’s,” an illustration in Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Wikimedia

Once a word attracts negative connotations there seems to be no going back, linguist Kate Burridge tells Peter Clarke in the second of a series of Inside Language.

Listen here.

Duration: 7 minutes 9 seconds

Kate Burridge is professor of linguistics at Monash University. Peter Clarke is a Melbourne-based broadcaster, writer and educator who pioneered national talkback on Australian radio as the inaugural presenter of Offspring (now Life Matters) on ABC Radio National.

Topics: Inside Language | language | podcast

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Kenneth Slessor goes to the movies

Tom O'Regan

4 January 2016

The celebrated poet invented his own way of writing about the films of the early sound era, says Tom O’Regan

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An Elizabethan age: Smith’s Weekly’s publicity photo announcing Kenneth Slessor’s appointment as chief film critic. National Library of Australia MS 3020/7/3/118, Box 8

An Elizabethan age: Smith’s Weekly’s publicity photo announcing Kenneth Slessor’s appointment as chief film critic. National Library of Australia MS 3020/7/3/118, Box 8