Last weekend, Sydney was urged to switch off the lights on Saturday night between 7:30 and 8:30 pm, for what was dubbed ‘Earth Hour’. I went with some friends to Milson’s point to have a small picnic and watch the city lights go off.

We were underwhelmed.

At 7:30 the lights on the arches and structural columns of the Harbour Bridge went out and at 8:00 the Opera House decided to switch off the purely aesthetic lights on the sails. That was about it.

I wasn’t expecting the entire CBD to suddenly descend into darkness – they clearly can’t switch off the street lights, et cetera – but even so, there seemed to be plenty of lights still on. In fact the only differences I noticed were the Bridge and Opera House. So hopefully you can understand my befuddlement upon seeing this image in the Sun-Herald the next day.

It looks like a huge difference, right?

Well apparently the ‘before’ photos were taken on the Thursday night, not just ‘before’ Earth Hour on the Saturday night as implied. The reason being that most people in the city switched off their lights before leaving the office on the Friday afternoon, as they should, but it meant that the Sun-Herald couldn’t get a good comparison image. I would contend that the comparison photos should be taken at a corresponding time, say, exactly a week earlier. There have also been photographers speculating that the differences between the various pairs of photos were mainly due to exposure; they were doctored¹. All this is outlined on the MediaWatch website, who broke the story last night.

While I fully support whatever the people who organised Earth Hour were trying to do, I think it was all a little bit bogus; a publicity-driven response to what is a very complex and difficult problem. Hopefully it wasn’t being seen as a ‘solution’ at all, just a demonstration, but obviously some thought it was meant to be an earnest attempt at saving an hour’s worth of electricity:

By switching off our lights … we kept the equivalent of 48,000 cars off our roads for one hour. That’s the equivalent of taking 5.5 cars off our road per year. If by making Earth Hour a yearly event we all feel like we are doing something for the environment, we are deluding ourselves.

Clearly, saving electricity was not the immediate and direct purpose of Earth Hour, but rather to draw attention to how much electricity is wasted so that the public in the future might be a little bit less flippant in a country where energy costs are certainly no disincentive to consumers.

We shouldn’t have to be coerced into consuming less energy. It should be the norm.

¹By the way, Fairfax, which owns the Sun-Herald, was one of the sponsors of Earth Hour.

I just heard on ABC news that “Police are worried that the road toll will remian high”.

“Remain”? Are they hoping for a few timely Easter resurrections, perhaps?

I missed out on celebrating April fool’s day – the tragedy – but when this is the standard of practical jokes this year, I’m not at all regretful.

It seems that name changes are currently in vogue. So what better time than now to change mine.

The bloviator is no more and we shall never speak of him again. From now on, this blog will be called matjjin-nehen.

I swear it’s the last time.

It’s well-known in the literature that languages can have various methods for the categorisation of space. The system that uses left, right and so on is the Egocentric system and the one that uses North, South, East and West is the Absolute system. Some cultures use only the absolute system (like a lot of Papua New Guinea cultures) and some use a mixture of the two. English, for instance, uses the egocentric system for close or medial spatial relations, and the absolute system for larger scale relations.

There’s also a third sort of system and it’s more or less a middle ground between these two. I forget the name of it, but the idea is you pick a geographically-salient landmark, a mountain or a river or something usually suffices, and make it the spatial centre. In this system, someone may be ‘more riverward’ with respect to you, but cross the river in the same order and you will then be ‘more riverward’ with respect to them.

Until recently I thought English only used the first two; the egocentric and the absolute systems. Then one day I heard¹ this announcement (emphasis added):

The ferry on the B side of the wharf, the Opera House side, goes to Manly only.

The ferry on the A side of the wharf, the Harbour Bridge side, goes to Taronga Zoo.

Is that not a landmark-centric spatial system?

While I’m on the topic, I tried (mostly in vain) to implement an absolute system for smaller-scale relations when I worked as a deliboy during my undergraduate years. The counter in this store ran almost due East to West, and people would ask for, say, ‘that leg ham, the one on the left’. Now, I could have done what most would in that situation and ask ‘My left or yours?’ but it isn’t as fun as asking ‘the one on the East or the West?’. It never did catch on. Customers just gave me looks of bewilderment as if they had no idea which was which, and the boss thought I was being a twat.

~

¹To be fair, I hear it about every second day as I am lucky enough to be able to catch a ferry to work, but until the other day I’d never paid any attention to it for its spatial relations.

I’m not a happy pappy. I had to wait until a conference on Australian Languages to hear that I’ve picked a pretty bad title for my blog. I’m not going to name names, but D. Nash – no wait, that’s a little too obvious, let’s just say… David N., – pointed out to me at the annual informal gathering of Australian Language specialists known as Blackwood, held over the weekend, that The Bloviator is a little stupid. In retrospect, he’s probably right.

I have another name that I’ve been quietly ruminating over for a few days but I’m still undecided. I am tending towards a Wagiman phrase, since it’s the first language I’ve worked on as a linguist and I feel attached to it in some respect.

The front-running candidate at the moment is mamin matjjin-nehen¹ and it means literally a (white) man (or a devil, funnily enough) without a language, or even simply matjjin-nehen ‘language-less’. It is meant to be a comment on my effective monolingualism². I grew up in an English-only household in Sydney and pretty much never gave a thought to the vastness and diversity of the languages of the world until university, and certainly knew nothing of the languages of Australia until well into university.

The role of language in my life thus never went beyond being a means of communication. So when I did my first research fieldtrip to study the Wagiman language, one of the most striking things was the cultural salience and identity attached to language. In fact, such was the importance of language to culture that it made me feel bereft of both language and culture.

So when I say I’m a man without language, I mean that I lack the sort of rich cultural background that values and connects language, land and kin. I’m taking the concept matjjin ‘language/story/word’ to metaphorically represent all this.

So that’s the front runner for the time being, but I’m not going to make the mistake of changing to it until I feel it’s the right one.

Feedback on this will be welcomed.

~

¹The tjj is a fortis palatal stop, but it sounds to the European ear like a voiceless alveolar affricate, like at the end of much. The h in nehen is a glottal stop, but it usually reduces to a long vowel ne:n.

²Yes, I’m aware that being monolingual doesn’t make me ‘language-less’ as such; I’m speaking metaphorically. And yes, I’m well-aware of the irony of describing myself as ‘language-less’ in another language, but of course, it isn’t my language, it’s theirs; they’re just allowing me speak it a little.

I’ll admit that it isn’t exactly a very nice phonological word, in fact it sounds horrible. But after reading it in Mike Carlton’s regular Saturday column over the weekend, I decided to make at least some use of it.

Carlton’s column was about the furore within the media that former ABC (Australia’s publicly owned broadcaster) journalist Maxine McKew is running for the Labor party in the Prime Minister’s own seat of Bennelong. Apparently it’s proof positive that “the ABC is a nest of Howard-hating pinko subversives”, just to quote Carlton’s rich imagery. All this rhetoric and furore is, in Carlton’s opinion, nothing but ‘bloviate’ (noun, initial stress), and the right-wing pundits and columnists who take Howard’s side to please their boss, Rupert Murdoch, are the ‘bloviators’ in this affair.

The column began with an introduction to the word:

Bloviate is a splendid word from America. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to bloviate is “to speak or write verbosely and windily”. The Oxford English Dictionary, which has only recently picked up the word from across the Atlantic, says it’s “to talk at length in an empty and inflated way”.

I was initially under the impression that this word is a recent coinage, from some time in the last 6 years or so. But the Oxford English Dictionary (online) cites sources going back as far as 160 years. I therefore have less reservation about using it here.

Which brings me to the issue; why am I using it here? Surely this is not meant to be empty and inflated rhetoric but rather, something a little more substantial. Well, yes. But in the spirit of The Chaser, whose motto used to be Striving for Mediocrity in a World of Excellence, I’ve taken an ironic point of view toward the notion of bloviation.

If I am indeed ‘yearning for empty rhetoric in a world of literary profundity’ then everything I say can be taken to be meaningless, including the name ‘bloviator’, in which case the name doesn’t necessitate that anything at all should be empty and inflated, in which case the name is meaningful again. Oh, the irony.

Of course, the world is not full of literary profundity at all, and there is no shortage whatsoever of empty rhetoric, but perhaps that’s partly my point.

If the name sucks (or ‘fellates’, to use a bloviational equivalent) then tell me.

The name of this blog is terrible. It was the result of probably less than one minute of creative thought. So, I’d like to solicit your help in coming up with a better name, which, of course, will not be difficult.

Please give me your suggestions!

The QM2, that is, the Queen Mary 2, arrived in Sydney early this morning and I was a bit excited at the prospect of catching the ferry from Burragi (Bradley’s Head) to Warrang (Sydney Cove/Circular Quay) as I’d assumed they’d park the thing at Dalawulada (The International Terminal, Circular Quay). However, due to its unfathomable size (too high to fit under the bridge, too long to fit at the international terminal), they had to park it instead at Bayinguwa (Garden Island).

That was all segue, designed to lead into a talk about the name ‘Garden Island’. Now, I was always confused because, well, the name ‘Garden Island’ has at least two things wrong with it. For a start, it’s a shipyard and there’s hardly a skerrick of garden on it and secondly, it’s not even an island, it’s just a peninsula. Look:

In fact it reminds me of a number of Simpsons episodes that played on this island/peninsula alternation. The best was when Lisa was imagining being punished for failing gym class and being sentenced to a lifetime of horror on “Monster Island”. The judge promptly reassures her with Don’t worry. It’s just a name. Cut to shot of Lisa and a group of similarly punished people fleeing a group of stampeding monsters. She complains to one of the others He said it was just a name! To which one of them replies What he meant is that Monster Island is actually a peninsula. (giggling quietly to myself) For those of you who care, the prospect of failing gym resulted in her joining an Ice-Hockey team.

Enough of that. Of course, Bayinguwa was once a garden-laden Island, as this old picture is supposed to show, except I, for one, can’t see it too well. Apparently the construction of a dry dock ended up connecting the island with the mainland (according to some dude, via Wikipedia).

I suppose I don’t have a point, really. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that English names for geographical features can become dated. Then again, perhaps after a century or two of the government’s incorrigible attitude towards climate change, it may just become an island again.

[By the way: Every time I see the word Bayinguwa I wince a little, because I have the intuition it should be Bayingowa. The records show two alternate spellings from the British in the early days, one of which is Bayinguwa. The other one, Ba-ing-hoe, I have largely ignored. The two are consistent with each other, except for the quality of the penultimate vowel. Was it /u/ or /o/? Without a third reference, and even with one, you can't really say. So, I've left it as I read it, Bayinguwa, though, not without reservations.]

I might take this opportunity to wish everybody a benign, theologically non-specific, northern hibernal solstice celebrations, as well as an inebriating anniversary of an arbitrarily selected point of the Earth’s rotation around the nearest star.

Happy Solstice.