Word, Truth and Genre-Bending in Australia: The Drive to Amuse in Story or Report, Rather than to Inform

Abstract

In the last generation there has occurred in the Australian media a subtle shift of emphasis from the giving of information or formal reporting to a but little disguised purpose to entertain. Both social critics and lexicographers have endeavoured to date this phenomenon more precisely, and there is now offered a sequence of quotations which assist this identification, as well as a noticing of a new related term, the type of homophone of 'happenings', namely'happynings'.