News at Eleven: 'I give a list of words occasionally,'

he [Les Murray] said. 'Holodomor was one I wanted to get in there. It's a Ukrainian word. It means the 7 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by Stalin. It's a word that ought to be as well-known as holocaust. Sometimes they name these dreadful genocides and sometimes they don't. It seemed a matter of justice that it got in.'

Language has been around in the Murray family a lot. 'The bloke who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary was a cousin of ours called Sir James Murray, a Murray language freak comes up every century or so.

'I used to want to be a master of languages but I ended up being a master of one, I think.'

 [by Les Murray]

 Last World Before the Stars

from Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne: Les Murray AO

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