odds ’n’ ends
If you’ve ever struggled to decipher Australian English, then ‘democracy sausage’ — the 2016 word of the year Down Under — may lead to blank faces with its obscure origins in election campaigning.
The Australian National Dictionary Centre defined it Wednesday as a barbecued sausage served on bread and bought at a polling booth “sizzle” on election day, which fell on July 2 this year.
How it came to be selected may baffle all but close observers of Australian politics.
But other contenders such as ‘smashed avo’, ‘census fail’ and ‘Ausexit’ could have been even more difficult to digest for outsiders. And the 2015 winner, ‘sharing economy’, is yet to find popular appeal.
The dictionary centre tried to explain its choice.
“Arguably, the democracy sausage has been one of the best things to come out of a tumultuous year in politics and political campaigning,” said centre director Amanda Laugesen.
“Its use was also boosted by a controversial incident where Opposition (Labor) leader Bill Shorten — who noted his sausage sandwich was ‘the taste of democracy’ — ate his sausage from the middle,” she said.
Sausage sizzles are barbecues for good causes, which proliferate outside big shops, schools and local sports events across the vast country. (AFP)
Steve Jobs may have been a technological revolutionary, but his legacy will not be remembered in a Paris street name.
Jobs’s name was one of several famous figures from the technology industry proposed to adorn new roads in the French capital’s soon to be launched tech startup campus in the southeastern 13th district.
The socialist local district mayor Jerome Coumet had proposed naming one of the new roads “Rue Steve Jobs” but the former American entrepreneur, who died in 2011, didn’t even make it to the voting booths after objections from communists and ecologists.
Instead, the likes of British World War II hero mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, whose work helped the Allies defeat the Nazis, and American computer scientist and former Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hooper, who pioneered computer coding, have both been chosen.
Apple products such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod may have revolutionised the technological world but Jobs faced a backlash when his name was put forward to be honoured in the hub. (AFP)