Our esteemed editor asks about the word ‘irits’. Is it, he asks, British or American or authentically Aussie. The good news is that this is ours. The word ‘irits’ cannot be found in the Oxford or Webster’s but is there in all its colloquial glory in the Australian National Dictionary (first recorded from 1988) where it’s defined as ‘feelings of annoyance and extreme vexation’. Clearly ‘the irits’ is a typical piece of Aussie word-clipping (in this case clipped from ‘the irritations’). In my book The Story of Australian English (New-South Books, 2015) I devote an entire chapter to ‘Incredible shrinking words’. All languages abbreviate words, but Aussies seem to be especially fond of producing neatly clipped bonsai versions of useful words – ‘aggro’, ‘arvo’, ‘ambo’, ‘barbie’, etc. Professor Roly Sussex (and his students) once collated these Aussie diminutives and found more than 5,000. And ‘the irits’ is one of them. But why is our esteemed editor so interested? Possibly because he occasionally displays ‘the irits’ on TV when discussing the latest inanities of the Climate Cult (and who could blame him?)

If something suits you perfectly and exactly then it suits you ‘to a T’. The Oxford traces this expression back to 1693. One proposal is that it comes from the T-square – because the T-square facilitates exactness. The problem is that the name ‘T-square’ is not found in our language until 1785. That’s 92 years too late to be the source of ‘to a T’. What about golf? Could the origin be from the start of a golf game ‘to a tee’? The problem here is that all the earliest citations don’t have that spelling – they all have ‘to a T’. The muddle of writing it as ‘to a tee’ seems to be a much later invention. The Oxford folk mention that ‘it has also been suggested that it referred to the proper completion of the letter t by crossing it’ before dismissing this one as well. Then the Oxford says that the ‘T’ in question is the initial letter of a word – specifically the word ‘tittle’. This means ‘a dot or other small mark used in writing or printing’. These days we are familiar with this only in the combined expression ‘every jot and tittle’ – meaning ‘every little bit’. And both parts of that refer to small marks on paper – a ‘tittle’ is the dot over the lower-case letter ‘i’ and a ‘jot’ is the cross-bar on the letter t. So, if something suits you to the last little dot, then it suits you ‘to a T’.

Meet an extremely silly new word – ‘mankeeping’. The Urban Dictionary, defines ‘mankeeping’ as: ‘When a woman bears the emotional weight of a heterosexual relationship with little if any return’. Their entry is only dated from July of this year, which suggests this is a very new word. The Collins Dictionary includes ‘mankeeping’ in its list of words under consideration for their next edition. They define it as ‘the emotional and social labour that straight women often take on in their relationships with straight men, most specifically around social connections’. ‘Mankeeping’ most likely started as an academic word in sociology departments. Which explains a lot. Has any good thing ever come out of a sociology department? The word was coined by two Stanford psychologists who claimed ‘mankeeping’ as yet another example of gender inequality, saying that men never have D&Ms (‘deep and meaningful’) relationships with each other, and so are dependent on women for emotional support. Really? A lot of blokes (in my experience) aren’t bothered by D&Ms or by any navel-gazing ‘emotional support’. All blokes want to do is to get on with it. There are tasks to be tackled, and jobs to be done – so, just get on with it! And these same blokes will patiently put up with hours of their women talking about the ups, downs, ins and outs of their female relationships. Blokes don’t need ‘keeping’. So as I said, a silly new expression. But then, I am a mere male, so what would I know?