This year’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize received over 370 entries interpreting the theme of travel in broad and imaginative ways. Given the number of entries, those experimenting with form, language and perspective — or otherwise taking creative risks — were a pleasure to run across.

It’s a slippery slope: one day you swap -ise for -ize and call something ‘awesome’; the next you’re draped in stars and stripes and riding a mechanical bull into the golden arches of hell, where you swear before Donald Trump with one hand on Webster’s dictionary.

Mornings were when they were most forgiving of each other. When they fucked now it was first thing, when they were still kind. Before Clive got sick, he was always up early. He worked at the power plant in Hazelwood. Even when he’d been on night shift, he’d get up and make the coffee.

ICYMI, 20 October was Drop the Jargon Day. I missed it, which was a minor bummer, because I hate jargon. My current beef is with the phrase ‘reaching out’. I don’t even know why I hate it so much. I think it’s to do with the insidious way strangers started reaching out to me via email, when writing to or the similarly tactile getting in touch used to suffice. I also hate ‘touching base’ and virtually anything that involves the word ‘paradigm’.

One of the legacies of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership will surely be his tendency to misspeak. His worst lapses need no repetition, no explaining. Most of us have his best-of unfortunately committed to memory, and the quotes tend to be self-evidently racist /sexist /homophobic /Islamophobic /xenophobic /blisteringly ignorant of everything from climate change science to the importance of land and country to First Australians. Really, he covered a lot of ground.

When I told people I’d started working in the live department of a closed captioning company, they’d ask what the job actually involved. Then they’d say something like, ‘Some of those captions are terrible. The other day I was watching the footy at the pub, and I saw one that said [insert egregiously unintelligible sentence here].’ Having grown up with several deaf and hearing-impaired family members of varying ages and interests, I was accustomed to watching television with the captions on – so I was also accustomed to their often dismal standard. Sometimes they’re incomprehensible. Sometimes they’re delayed. Sometimes they obscure important graphic information on the screen. Sometimes they’re absent.

Halfway through my presentation a fellow student interjected and began regurgitating exactly what I’d been saying. He spoke directly to me, as if he were the tutor and I were his lowly student who hadn’t quite managed the readings that week. It was infuriating, and oddly humiliating – I started to wonder if I had misunderstood the theory, since he was delineating it with such gusto.

To this day, there is a particular sort of person we describe as ‘FOTZ’. It’s hard to define exactly, but I know ’em when I see ’em. FOTZ is the intersection between dagginess, hippydom, and social ineptitude. Their beetroots are organic and their children are gifted. They wear their sense of superiority like a defensive cloak. When I started thinking about this article, I asked my mother what characterises a FOTZ. ‘It’s standing on top of the tour guide so as not to miss a thing,’ she said, ‘but not wearing your listening ears because you don’t have that capacity.’

Words are added to dictionaries when their usage gains currency. Merriam-Webster advises that a new word must have ‘enough citations to show that it is widely used’. The Macquarie says ‘to earn a place in a dictionary, a word has to prove that the community at large accepts it’. This isn’t something the linguistic powers-that-be take lightly. ‘Twerk’ didn’t make it in because an Oxford editor went to a Big Freedia show and decided to (literally) spread the good word.

I want to treat language with respect. But I also want to respect the people who use it. And this is why no linguistic error will ever make me roll my eyes more than miserly nitpickers - often anonymous - who take it upon themselves to correct others' spelling, grammar and punctuation online.

Since I'm not really sure what constitutes 'the Real Deal' - and I'm not sure Boudinot does either - it’s hard to understand who’s qualified to bestow this title on a pupil. In writing school, I sat in three years' worth of novel classes. Some of my peers went on to have their manuscripts published. Some of them are still redrafting their work.

My grandmother passed away this week. She was ninety-five. It was not a shock. A few weeks ago she was hospitalised for what was believed to be kidney failure. It all went south from there: infections, rehabilitation, a fall from a hospital bed, refusal to eat, collapsed veins, delirium.

We left the Hôpital Saint-Antoine at dawn. We stood on the pavement, cold and dumb. I heard the whale song of an ambulance fade sourly into the streets. It was Lewis who turned his back on the building first. ‘Come on,’ he said, with a jerk of his hand. ‘Let’s go home.’

Winner: 2013 Overland Victoria University short story prize