Language Matters: To care or not to care

Style Council, initiated in 1986, is one of the responsibilities of the Dictionary Research Centre in Macquarie University. It was conceived by a small group of the authors and editors of the Macquarie Dictionary, and is still managed by them, in close cooperation with the staff of Macquarie Library Pty Ltd. publishers of the dictionaries that bear the Macquarie name.

Not a council with a standing membership, Style Council has met annually since 1986, so far in either Sydney or Melbourne, with about a hundred participants. Among the participants so far have been editors, publishers, authors, journalists, broadcasters, teachers, educational planners, linguists lexicographers, lawyers, computer specialists, technical communicators, business communicators, and others known to have professional or even just personal interests in the ways language is used.

In Style Councils, attention is focussed on Australian usage in writing and speech, though comparisons with other national varieties of English are usually accepted as pertinent. And the multilingual nature of the Australian community is never forgotten. The participants come from all over Australia, or from overseas, and many are sponsored by their employer or their professional organisation.

Each Style Council has a program of invited papers, with generous provision of time for question and discussion. For what it is worth, a census of opinions or preferred practice is often taken on points of variant usage, and whenever it seems necessary and there is an acceptable consensus in the participants, each Council may address a motion or petition to a governmental or other authority, requesting particular action. The proceedings of all the Style Councils so far, covering all these activities, have been edited and published by the Dictionary Research Centre. They are contained in three separate volumes: Style in Australia, Frontiers of Style, and Australian Style into the Nineties, all edited by P. H. Peters.

These volumes may be seen as an ongoing contribution to the considerable body of literature on style and usage in Australia. Within this body, though not normally available to the public, are the in-house style manuals of some government departments, publishing houses, newspapers, schools, universities and business organisations. Though not accessible these are clearly very influential in the setting of community standards in language. Fortunately there is now also a fast-growing body of published works bearing on language style. Some of these offer guidance to their readers on points of style and usage from a corporate viewpoint (as with the Style Manual published by the Australian Government Publishing Service, or Watch Your Language! a set of discussions of disputed points in language taken from the meetings of the ABC's Standing Committee on Spoken English). But style guidance also comes from individual authors, more or less confident that their judgments are well-based and useful to the general reader. See, for example, Stephen Murray-Smith's Right Words (Viking, 1989), or The Australian Writers'and Editors' Guide (OUP, 1991). Distinct from such style guides, but perhaps even more important, are the descriptive accounts that hold up the mirror to Australian usage, warts and all. Some of these consist of a comprehensive set of descriptive articles on a large number of head-words, alphabetically ordered. These, then, are the dictionaries, and among them some are closely focussed on the use of English in Australia: on Australianisms in Ramson's Australian National Dictionary (OUP), on colloquialisms in Wilkes's Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (Sydney University Press), and on the whole vocabulary in common use in Australia in the Macquarie Dictionary (Macquarie Library).

The purpose of the present newsletter, the first of a series now made possible by a grant from the Commonwealth Government, is to air questions of style and usage, especially those at the frontiers of language change, and to encourage a wide range of interested readers to participate in the delineation of Australian style by offering information, raising questions and expressing views. It will be distributed widely, in a print run set for the time being at 15 000 copies, to persons, institutions and societies throughout Australia known or thought to have particular interests in the uses of language. The editors would be glad to receive notice of names that might by added to the distribution list.

After all, it is people who by their own practice in speaking and writing ultimately define the standards by which language as an institution may be judged. Both conservation and change in language are democratic processes, and vigilance is best when shared. More than anything else, vigilance needs to be supported by an educated facility in knowing (in the words of T. S. Eliot) how best "to care and not to care" about what you see going on around you, in language as in other things. The editors of this newsletter invite you to join them in their vigil.