ANTARCTIC DICTIONARY
by Bernadette Hince
The sub-title of Bernadette Hince’s book: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English both gives its scope and raises questions. Antarctica is the one continent that is uninhabited, except by a few scientific groups. So the job of creating a dictionary of its English might seem to be a useless task. But the fringes of the continent have been visited for centuries by ships, such as the American and British whalers who fought their way around Cape Horn to reach the South Seas sperm whale fisheries. And the scientific communities in the Antarctic are mainly English-speaking, and have been permanently staffed settlements long enough to have developed a characteristic vocabulary and slang.
For example, the British presence is now through a body called the British Antarctic Survey, but until 1962 this had the name of the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS). Workers with it were called fids, and the acronym has survived the change of name, with fidlet created to describe a first-year fid. Someone slotted has fallen into a crevasse; greenout is sometimes used for the emotion felt on seeing and smelling green things after a period on the ice; big eye is insomnia caused by changes in the length of daylight; a beaker is a scientist (presumably borrowed from the character in the Muppets); if unwanted or unpopular, the term changes to jafa, Just Another [expletive deleted] Academic; Ms Hince appends a dry note to this entry: “I am puzzled by its lack of wider application”).
Unlike Eskimos, who really don’t have 170 words for snow despite stories to the contrary, scientists in Antarctica have a fair-sized vocabulary for different sorts of ice; for example, frazil is needles or slushy plates of sea ice that form in rough water; congelation ice, from an old English word for congealing or freezing, is another sort of sea ice that forms underneath frazil; grease ice is a later stage of forming sea ice, when the plates start to clump together; pancake ice is small floes, the beginning of winter pack ice.
As everyone in Antarctica is a temporary immigrant, people bring their own linguistic background and vocabularies with them, so that many terms can be traced to somewhere else: frazil to Canadian English, for example. And as a result of geographical separation on what is a very big and inaccessible area, the slang of American scientific groups is rather different to British and Australian ones: though everyone appreciates fresh fruit or vegetables flown in when the weather permits, only the Americans call them freshies.
To concentrate on slang — however evocative — would be to distort Ms Hince’s purpose and the nature of the book. Her aim has been to record all aspects of Antarctic English (under which she includes all the sub-Antarctic islands lower than 40 degrees S, including the Falklands and Tristan da Cunha).
Though one result has been to record and explain some gems of language, the larger part of her book consists of terms that are hardly unique to the area (such as blue whale, husky, frostbitten, leopard seal), and she includes many phrases whose meanings are obvious (icy waste, polar summer, very heavy ice). However, her notes on origins are sometimes insightful or surprising, for example suggesting an origin for gentoo penguin in the Spanish juanito, or pointing out early use of tea bags (both object and name), on Antarctic expeditions long before they became household items.
You may gather I found it fun to browse, especially as there are many supporting citations for each entry, and the text as a whole builds up a fascinating picture of Antarctic exploration. But I’m an untypical reader. I’m puzzled to find an obvious constituency of readers for it, outside specialists or those with a strong interest in the continent, who will find it absorbing.
[Hince, Bernadette The Antarctic Dictionary: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English, published by CSIRO, Australia, December 2000; pp404; ISBN 0-9577471-1-X; publisher’s list price Aus$39.95.]
