Comments on: Traditional Weather

By: More Traditional Weather; Health « matjjin-nehen

More Traditional Weather; Health « matjjin-nehen — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 22:45:01 +0000

[...] , Australian Politics , Environmentalism , linguistics , Meteorology , Health I noted back here that the Bureau of Meteorology had included on their website a page called Indigenous Weather [...]

By: Claire

Claire — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:49:19 +0000

March flies are “marsh flies” in the Bardi dictionary – I’ve never worked out where the error originated, whether it was misparsing by the compiler of Aboriginal English or whether it’s an eggcorn (since, as you say, March flies don’t appear in March here)

By: Jaŋari

Jaŋari — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:45:25 +0000

Sure, unless the march in march flies is taken as some metaphor referring to their relentlessness in attacking you. I've never heard the term 'podism' before, thanks for that. A quick google search shows that not too many others have either. In fact, it seems to most often relate to, you guessed it, iPod culture.

By: David Nash

David Nash — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:27:30 +0000

What I also like about

The appearance of March flies in September or October…

is that the insect’s English name is yet another podism we live with Down Under [podism!]. I owe the concept to the late Don Laycock

Both the Macquarie Dictionary (MD) and Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (CTCD) give ‘anticlockwise’ as a second meaning of widdershins/ withershins. As the word is good Anglo-Saxon for ‘against the direction (of the sun)’, it is clear that the direction is clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. It is even possible to object that our use of ‘clockwise’ is podist, since the only reason that clocks and watches go clockwise is that they follow the direction of the shadow on a Northern Hemisphere sundial. Southern Hemisphere watches should go ‘anticlockwise’ – and equatorial watches should go back and forth. (1982:2)

Laycock, DC, 1982, On podism in dictionaries. The Macquarie Dictionary Society [Newsletter] 1/4 (December 1982), 2-3; Correction… 2/2 (November 1983), 3.