The Sun-Herald

WHO WE ARE: Take the words right out of our mouth

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A column about Australia by David Dale, published in The Sun-Herald, 10/1/2010
HEY, wassup? Going forward, am I about to plate-up for you a nicely nuanced fusion of the toxic legacy of language passed on from 2009 to 2010? Yes I am, and I'm not Greching.

Doesn't quite work, that paragraph, partly because some of the terms I forced into it did not survive the leap from last year to this.

Back in February, this column prematurely declared the 2009 BWOTY (Buzz Word of the Year) to be the conversion of "nuance" from noun to verb, after the former Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, said this in an interview: "Have I seen attempts to nuance information to cover for mistakes? Yes. Have I seen nuanced information in an attempt to produce outcomes that are more favourable to those who are responsible for the issue? Yes."

(Note his clever use of another rhetorical technique - asking yourself a question and answering it. Fitzgibbon also liked to start sentences with the useful phrase "going forward" or "moving forward").

The former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull went on to become the nabob of nuancing, and caused the newsletter Crikey to declare: "His economic message on the stimulus packages ... has more nuance than, well, Nuanced Jack McNuance, winner of this year's Mr Nuance competition."

For a while it looked as if the name of Godwin Grech, the man who started Turnbull's fall from grace, would be added to the language as a synonym for trick, manipulate or distort. But Australians are not so cruel. When they learned that he was residing in a mental hospital, they stopped accusing each other of Greching the truth.

And nuancing vanished with the rise of Tony Abbott, a man determined to see only black and white. Turnbull had tried to nuance the Government's climate change policy, instead of opposing it, and thus nuanced himself out of a job. Abbott's contribution to public discourse was the adjective "toxic". After he described Kevin Rudd as "a toxic bore", we started hearing about toxic assets, toxic legacies and toxic bachelors.

Mercifully, that word was not applied to any of the contestants on MasterChef, which made its contribution to the national vocabulary with "plating-up" - composing your food like a work of art. The program was so popular with all demographics there were tales of eight year old boys who complained that their school lunches had been improperly plated-up.

The pioneer of plating-up, long before the term entered general usage, was Cheong Liew, the chef at The Grange restaurant in Adelaide. He is credited with introducing the multicultural mix called "fusion cuisine" in Australia, more than 20 years ago. Fusion briefly re-entered the national conversation when the news broke in October that The Grange was closing down.

When I ate there ten years ago, my first course consisted of eight tiny tastes composed around a large white plate. Delivering it, the waiter said: "Chef suggests you eat these clockwise, starting from the 6 o'clock position." Now that's plating-up.

And while we're talking about conspicuous consumption, last year saw the word "piccolo" added to the repertoire of coffee shops across the land. This year we should see a further expansion with the arrival of the "cortado" - a permutation of espresso and steamed milk currently a fad in Madrid, Lisbon and London.

Can you go to comments to nominate other expressions likely to drive us crazy this year? Yes, you can.

David Dale is the author of The Little Book of Australia -- A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.