Relative and constitutive as these sources are, they could well be appraised in terms of the constructions they establish. A guide to English usage in Australia can hardly lack deep-laid formative force. Those like the Pocket Oxford which merely add a neat appendix of local usages must starkly realise a colonising culture and its power. Murray-Smith, whose whole regime of entries is permeated with local words, history, attitudes, provides a construction of a more Australian authority, to many these days a good deal more acceptable.

One of the best elements here, and the most importantly self-constructive, is the series of little essays which work around a set of related words and their connotations, both desirable and not so. It’s not unlike Raymond Williams’ method in Keywords: Murray-Smith employs nearly as much history as Williams but has a more specific kind of judgement. He writes with the tone of a leader writer in a progressive newspaper as he deals with commonwealth, charting the intriguing problems in this word, describing various attempts to minimise its use, and ending with some recommendations – even a short reading list.

Decisiveness can be sharper, as in the paragraph on holocaust; this offers etymological precision, briefly lucid information about the wartime connotation, and then a probing suggestion that ‘to use such a word, almost as shorthand, is to deprive the acts themselves of their true and terrible meaning and ambience. It enables a quick cursory nod in the direction of what was perhaps mankind’s greatest single act of evil. This may even become a form of easy dismissal’.

With equally self-aware firmness, bully words like viable and parameter are treated with vigorous contempt. So are offensive intruders, perhaps a little narrowly: first base (getting to) and rain check (taking one) seem to be genuinely useful metaphors without a pre-existing equivalent. One of the best sequences of sociolinguistic commentary comes under the female critique and is re­current throughout. Murray-Smith rehearses the feminist arguments on language and supports most of their points. He is firmly against feminine versions like actress, poetess, though he does permit waitress, holding that she has no lower status than waiter ... some might argue, but the single distinction does show some close thinking. Equally S.M.-S. accepts Ms, since people use it, since people want to use it and, in the discriminating terms in which this guide is developed, since that wish seems socially positive.

Lexicographers with major impact have always written in such confident ways, not restricting themselves to description, however safely quasi-academic that might seem. The approach will bring disagreements, but Murray­Smith is well prepared for them by the scope and thoughtfulness of such entries. They would also make the book the more useful in a school; a lesson could easily be based on three or four selected entries, such as those on pidgin, Australasian, Papua, and even Far East which suggests, and not ironically either, that Near North would be a more acceptable usage in these parts.

These decisive interventions are legitimised by the normal business of the traditional usage programme, ranging as it does from Fowler’s mixture of the exotic and the austere through to the brand-new crisp denotations of Philip Roberts’ Plain English. Like them Murray-Smith provides a wide range of clear distinctions on tricky pairs such as evoke/invoke, licence/license, prone/supine, shall/will. In informational terms, particularly effective and credibility – providing are the lecturettes on punctuation, pointing out not only what you do but why you do it. A genuinely lively page on colons, a positively dashing sequence on the hyphen in its many forms. Sub-editors cashiered by the word processors, lovers of language precision, semi-colon fetishists, they will relish this material.

Only a little less weighty are well­judged entries on familiar cruces – when to double a letter before a stem suffix (combatting, e.g.), how to handle -able and -ible in adjectives, -ise and -ize in verb-formations. The local construction of this guide is founded on an impeccable technical basis – and can flourish into some enjoyable sports such as a valuable if exogenous perpetual calendar, and some entertaining poems in loose illustration of a passing point (see under sough, reason).

Sometimes Murray-Smith’s wordsmith’s sense of duty makes him fight in the last ditch for words that are not indeed forlorn hopes, but which have lost aspirations. Positions are being overrun for locate against find, continual against continuous, and blunted beyond surgical use are the antique precisions of panacea, trauma, identify, even ungendered chauvinism. Entries like these are accurate, wistful, quixotic. (See under Don Q. for pronunciation.)

Usage guides always have, but seldom relish so much, that element of personal choice, the evaluative idiolect. A part of that privatised tradition is the dictionary error. Can the lexicographer himself be constructed from his nods? Johnson, like Coleridge an indifferent horseman, showed his ‘pure ignorance’ over pastern. Well, the present editor is a non-golfer or a hopeless one since he states that bogey is ‘the standard good score for a hole in golf. Early on perhaps he represses the name of his great contemporary, giving Keywords to Richard Hoggart on page eight, but, perhaps with growing confidence, it is returned to Williams by page forty-nine. A personal voice appears with a trace of Westminster Cockney, that slang of effortless superiority, offering as standard the pronunciations clothes as ‘close’ and fortune as ‘forchin’. That is augmented by no-nonsense John Bullery, sounding a final ‘s’ in apropos and the Mall as ‘Mal’ not ‘Maul’.

It’s a rather engaging ensemble, cheerily firm and robustly entertaining like Right Words in general. To maintain that humanised voice and lively commitment to a particular country’s particularised idiom as well as holding a high level of precision, that is a skilful and imaginative achievement. There’s delight here in the word chook, relish in listing providore for the first time, definite traces of glee in jousting with self-appointed authorities like the ABC and the Macquarie dictionary.

This book has an excellent chance of becoming a standard text; it will give good service in school and at home, being both reliable and in a wide sense beneficial, and that mostly through its assemblage of an appealingly Australian visage among the normally faceless parade of linguistic reference guides.