Flong time no see: my adventures with a daily dictionary dip

Today’s column is flong. Old-time printers will know flong as a mould made from wet pulp, shaped by a metal stereotype then pressed upon the page. The inky mess shares its roots with flan, an industrial dessert ideal for producing script. Upstairs, away from the printers’ chapel, journos knew flong as any non-topical article used to bolster a slow news day.

Like this column: pure flong, a column free of time-hook or current affair. Unless you count the hellstorm of global news, the fuel crisis, the AI squeeze, Gaza, Ukraine, Trump. Because everyone needs to untether for a moment. Be that music or running. Or reading a dictionary, in my case. Haphazardly, I should add. Not A to Z, as that would be insane. Rather I sift a random double-page of words each morning, jotting down the novelties (like flong) I find in the Collins English Dictionary (2018).

Dear reader, the treasures I’ve found. Words such as delope, meaning to shoot your pistol deliberately above the head of your opponent to call off a duel. Or petalism, a botanical variant of ostracism used in ancient Syracuse where the issuing of an olive leaf spelt a five-year exile to any dissident citizen – perhaps a practice we could revive in Canberra.

Dropping such words into conversation isn’t easy, believe me. Saying stuff like “I love your ristra” (that chilli string you hang in your kitchen), or “Spider-Man is a stegophile” – one who loves to climb buildings, only for the chat to sputter for want of footnote.