Kate Berry needed the plural of jack-in-the-box. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps she runs a toy shop or suffers baroque nightmares. Given the hyphens, I suspect jack-in-the-boxes, until I consider parallel muddles like needles in a haystack. Maybe jacks-in-the-boxes is the correct form, one jack per box. Here’s hoping we never need to know.
Since inboxes carry their own spring-loaded surprises. Last month I recoiled from a dozen word messages. Ben Talman, for one, reckons a noxious influencer should be an effluencer. Just as Lee Goddard says the inability to stack a dishwasher deserves to be known as dishlexia.
While Regan Pallandi reckons the ABC logo is a benign forecast, as per the rules of Reverend Spooner. Why, you ask. Don’t worry, I had to ask too. Because, said Regan, the squiggly dingus (two meshing sine waves labelled a Lissajous curve) is a spoonerism of funny and sign (or sine), giving sunny and fine. As a reply, I lamented the late Bill Oddie, the zany comedian and conservation champion, whose spoonerism sadly spelt his demise in late July. He leaves a rich legacy.
Nor do the jump-scares end there. A word-lover’s inbox can boing open any minute, often revealing a quirky observation. Take Matthew Paterson’s confession: “I was watching the US Open golf major last month and tried to write a clue involving two of the top golfers Xander Schauffele and Scottie Scheffler as their names are somewhat unusual and similar …”
Matthew, I feel you. We share a verbal bent. During the recent World Cup, I swooned at the anagram-adjacent game of Ecuador/Curacao, the all-A affair of Canada/Qatar, the noun showdown of Morocco (a leather) versus Brazil (a tree). Just as I switched colours midway through the 2010 French Open final when I realised Sam Stosur’s opponents, the Italian Francesca Schiavone, has anchovies in her surname. Sorry, Sam – rousts is not in the same league.
Still in the news, as vineyards sizzle in south-west France, Tony Healy had a query. “Do you think wildfire is worth a guernsey? In Australia, we used to say bushfire. Yet in the early 2000s TV reporters started using wildfire when copying American reports. Over time print journalists followed suit. We’ve now reached the stage where some government reports, and certainly media, now use wildfire to describe Australian bushfires. Is this the old cultural cringe at work?”
Yes and no, Tony. Wildfire dominates French headlines, or at least “incendies”, which translates that way. Forest fire is another option, even in US English, but wildfire is spreading across the world’s dictionaries as fast as the scourge itself, even here at home.
Not such a bad thing I’d argue, as often bushfires jump containment lines to imperil properties, factories, farmland, suburbs – those bush margins where wildfire at least encompasses both scenarios. Bushfire, it must be said, defines us, from the cultural burning among Indigenous peoples to winter’s prescribed burns by fire authorities. Which invites the modern irony, where an Australian fire in the wilderness is truly a bushfire. Leap its wild margins, however, the bushfire becomes a wildfire. Confused? Then try settling on the plural of jack-in-the-box.
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.
