Humdinger
At a meeting by teleconference of the National Portrait Gallery Foundation last week, I found myself reporting that our forthcoming exhibition So Fine is going to be “a humdinger,” whereupon Tim Fairfax chuckled and said that he hadn’t heard that expression for years. Afterwards, I wondered where on earth I ever picked up humdinger . Upon much reflection over the weekend, I’m pretty sure I got it from Mum, whose vocabulary was rich in unusual East Gippsland phrases. So I did some digging. I had thought that humdinger might turn out to be a rather quaint Edwardian Australianism, but it’s not in the Australian National Dictionary . Dinger certainly is there (vol. 1, p. 496): (Chiefly South Australian), a slingshot or the equivalent of a shanghai, together with the following charming citation (from the Australian Magazine [February, 2006]), viz.: “In the 1960s a Canberra Times photographer snapped Dame Pattie Menzies ‘knocking off spoggies...