AustLit

'We came about this issue’s theme by dumping loved words into a shared document: nouns, verbs, phrases and onomatopoeia that stirred a shared love of intimacy with language, of play and tricksterism. It came organically to us to follow the ones we especially adored through to their etymological origins, excavating what has been evaded over time, what surprises were nested in a patina of use. As poets, we liked travelling these pathways of speech, as much evolutionary biographies of language, as they were a kind of epistemic cypher for the logics of empire, historied English. It was telling that devotion reappeared as dedication’s close friend and placeholder, an almost-malapropism that gave way to a network of linkages, each becoming the other’s obverse at nodes in a web of quotes, synonyms and citations that enfleshed the theme.' ( Lou Garcia-Dolnik and Luke Patterson : Editorial introduction)