Category: General interest
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Word of the Month – November: goanna
goanna noun: (in Tasmanian use) the blue-tongue lizard Tiliqua nigrolutea. Most of us are familiar with goannas, a group of reptiles of the genus Varanus that includes the largest lizards in Australia—some more than two metres long. The term goanna is an Australian alteration of iguana, a large tropical lizard. Recently we were alerted to…
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Word of the Month – October: dog shot
noun: a sudden blow; a king-hit. verb: to hit (a person) suddenly and without warning; to king hit (a person). In an apology sent via text message, a rugby league player defended the actions of his group when they became involved in a fight outside a night club: ‘“… we never dog shotted any of…
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OUP wins third consecutive Secondary Publisher of the Year Award
Oxford University Press Australia & New Zealand (OUP ANZ) has received a third consecutive award for Secondary Publisher of the Year at the 2019 Educational Publishing Awards Australia. Oxford’s new-generation digital reading service Oxford Reading Buddy won the Primary Adaptations, Student or Teaching Resource award, and Oxford also won several awards across the Primary, Secondary…
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Word of the Month – September: burnt chop syndrome
noun: (esp. of a woman) the practice or habit of taking the least attractive item or option; the practice or habit of putting the needs and desires of others ahead of one’s own. Several years ago an Australian journalist described the experience of playing Monopoly with her family: ‘My brothers fought over the racing car…
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What the Children’s Word of the Year reveals about the lives of kids in Australia and the UK
What do the words Trump, equality, plastic and creativity have in common? They have all been named Children’s Word of the Year in competitions run by Oxford University Press in the UK and Australia in recent years. The words reveal that children are in touch with the current affairs and social issues of their time,…
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Celebrating Book Week with the books that have changed us
Books have a unique power to change people’s attitudes, and even their lives. This was never clearer than in the wake of the death of great American storyteller Toni Morrison, when writers and readers spoke out about the role that her books played in their lives. Among them, Australian authors Maxine Beneba Clarke and Melissa…
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The extraordinary life of a long-forgotten scientific genius
By Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science author Robyn Arianrhod The enigmatic Elizabethan Thomas Harriot never published his scientific work, so it’s no wonder that few people have heard of him. His manuscripts were lost for centuries, and it’s only in the past few decades that scholars have managed to trawl through the thousands of…
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OUP Australia opens its doors to innovation with HackLab 2019
Earlier in the year, OUP Australia welcomed educators, suppliers and distributors to its annual Hack Day, titled HackLab 2019. The day aimed to ignite a culture of innovation at OUP Australia and to hear and respond to the views and ideas of stakeholders on how it could better meet their needs. During HackLab 2019, six…