POSTED: 02 NOVEMBER 2010

Hugh Lunn’s Words Fail Me: An All New Journey through Australia’s Lost Language revisits the rich, inventive and rogueish language he celebrated in his best-selling Lost for Words, which has now been reprinted eight times.

Remember when:

You walked in late to a meeting and someone would say: “We’ve just been talking about you — nothing good of course.”

You couldn’t find something right under your nose and your mother would say: “If it was a snake it would have bitten you by now.”

You went swimming in the surf and she would say: “Don’t come home drowned.”

You went out to play: “If you break a leg, don’t come running to me.’

You went to the park: “Off you go, but don’t come back with your head under your arm.”

You acted like an idiot and someone inevitably said: “You don’t need pink and grey feathers to be a galah.”

It was a time when the only phone calls you received were from people you knew. When the people you did business with had surnames. When the blower was a phone, not a machine to blow your leaves onto your neighbour’s driveway. When a mobile was a macramé decoration that blew around on string in your 1970s bachelor pad. When secretaries typed with 10 fingers and journalists and private eyes typed with two. Now everyone’s a one-thumb typist.

Hugh Lunn believes we should save Australianisms, as he fears the day will arrive when we have become monoculturally American, with just 22 dismissive aggressive global TV sit-com phrases to cover all possible situations: OMG … whatever!

The way to save our vanishing language, says Hugh Lunn, is to start teaching Australian children that, like, there is, like, another language, like, apart from American.

Hugh Lunn has written many best-selling books, including Over the Top with Jim (ABC Books, 2007), Australia’s all-time best-selling childhood memoir.

His recent books include Lost for Words, a collection of words and phrases that have drifted out of everyday usage (ABC Books, 2006) and The Great Fletch, the dazzling life of Wimbledon larrikin Ken Fletcher (ABC Books, 2008).

As a journalist, Hugh worked for newspapers in Australia and London and was a Reuters correspondent in Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. He has won three national Walkley Awards for feature writing and one of his books, Vietnam: A Reporter’s War, won the Age Book of the Year and was published in New York. Hugh lives in Queensland.

*Based on media release issued by ABC Books.

PUBLISHING DETAILS

Words Fail Me: An All New Journey through Australia’s Lost Language, by Hugh Lunn | 352pp paperback $35 | Published by ABC Books, November 2010.

Hugh Lunn ... fears the day will arrive when we have become monoculturally American.