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Whatever its origins , munted is making its own history .
STRICTLY SPEAKING | MUNTED
Most English words have a history which can be traced back through centuries and even millennia . So those which the dictionary notes as “ origin unknown ” are a challenge – especially colloquial words like munted , which seems to pop up in New Zealand out of nowhere .
It ’ s first recorded in New Zealand in 1996 in the sense “ damaged , ruined ”, as
STRICTLY SPEAKING | ALGIARISM
No reader of Campus Review , or indeed anyone working in higher education , can have missed the anxiety about the fresh potential for applied to objects or institutions ( e . g . a bicycle or the education system “ is totally munted ”), or to human exhaustion (“ I ’ m munted ”).
The latter sense overlaps with fringe usage to mean “ intoxicated by alcohol or drugs ”, and with British slang muntered meaning “ drunk ” ( documented respectively in 1997 and 1998 ).
plagiarism created by the recently-released software ChatGPT .
Of course there ’ s now a new word for this type of academic dishonesty –
Munted later hit the headlines worldwide with the disastrous Christchurch earthquake ( 2010 ) and the trials of that “ munted city ”, reported along with Prince William ’ s visit and his acquisition of munted in the sense “ ruined ”.
He liked it , and with royal endorsement its use has increased steadily in regular news reporting ( from 2010 to 2023 ), as evidenced by the multi-billion-word NOW corpus .
Its level of usage is still much higher in New Zealand than Australian media ( ratio about 3:1 ), which would explain why it is less familiar to Australians .
Meanwhile in New Zealand English it has extended its grammatical role to become an active verb , in examples like “ She munted her toe ” and “ This predatory government has munted the country ”.
Whatever its origins , munted is making its own history in the southern hemisphere .
Emeritus Professor Pam Peters is a researcher with the Macquarie University Linguistics Department . ■
AIgiarism ( AI-assisted plagiarism ), coined by American venture capitalist Paul Graham according to an article in the Guardian .
There doesn ’ t seem to have been significant uptake of the term so far , perhaps because of its typographic ambiguity .
The ‘ AI ’ at the start could easily be read as an ‘ A ’ followed by a lowercase ‘ l ’, and in fact one Indian source , The News Minute , does just that – reinterpreting it in the process as ‘ algorithmic plagiarism ’.
And even if we retain the ‘ A ’ and ‘ I ’ of ‘ artificial intelligence ’, should we be pronouncing them as separate letters , or as a diphthong to rhyme with the first ‘ a ’ in plagiarism ?
The word plagiarism itself has an interesting origin , being derived from the Latin word for ‘ kidnapper ’.
Perhaps a sizable ransom will need to be paid to allow AIgiarism to retrieve its original identity . Or perhaps we ’ ll just need to think of a new word that is less open to manipulation .
Dr Adam Smith is the convenor of the Editing and Electronic Publishing Program at Macquarie University . ■
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