A hairy area in which to dice with semantics

The hairy-nosed wombat is a burrowing marsupial, heavily built, with short, powerful legs and long claws well adapted for digging. It lives in a burrow, emerging at night to feed on grass. The name derives from its distinctive muzzle, which is covered wcoith short, brown hairs.

The term "hairy-nosed wombat" is both descriptive and classificatory. For wombatologists, it qualitatively marks out a kind of wombat, without fear or favour or offence.

The term "dopey, hairy-backed sheila", on the other hand, is the designated term for a particular woman, to wit, a 45-year-old South African mother of three, who recently made specific allegations about the cricketer Shane Warne. The term was used by Victorian cricket coach David Hookes, who came out in Warne's defence. Hookes stands by his language, claiming that "hairy-backed" is "a commonly used term to describe South Africans" and that its use, in his sentence, was therefore descriptive, not derogatory.

Of course, descriptive adjectives don't have much meaning on their own. They emerge in utterances, surrounded by other words. Meanings are attributed to them within certain contexts by members of specific speech communities through their shared understanding. Hookes's comment was made in Australia for an Australian audience and he had to know that the uptake of his words would happen in Australia.

Turning to the dictionary, we find that the Collins includes "hairyback" (noun) as an offensive slang term, in the South African context, for an Afrikaner. So, even in its original context, "hairyback" is offensive. Transported to Australia, and deployed a la Hookes, the word loses its Afrikaner associations, but not its offensiveness. There's no need to trawl back through Paul Keating's speeches to sense that hyphenated body features (big-arsed, small-minded) serve nicely as abusive epithets.