Dry-Gulch Billabong

And you can also disagree with the world's leading geologists who study billabongs in both their wet and dry states. Dr. Russell Shiel, as just one example of many, studies Australia's Murray-Darling Basin to discover thousands of species in the sediments between floodings. It often takes quite a while before the dry-gulch billabongs fill again with water. When a billabong dries up, you don't stop calling it a billabong; it's just a dry billabong in a resting state, and I handled the situation with my modifier. I appreciate that you are more familiar with the common usage in your area. Australian words are also used outside Australia. Your local familiarity doesn't make you an expert in all usages of the word. It doesn't make Merriam-Webster wrong. It doesn't make me wrong. No poet should be restricted by common usage when a lesser known usage supplies a rich resource for rich verse. As you can tell, I am attracted to the less common. I have to stand my ground. Chuck

Since Webster's is commonly recognized by Americans as a/the preeminent standard for spelling, and perhaps for its definitions as well, why would an American disagree with it? Billabong is an English/American word found in English/American dictionaries. Just as is dissension/dissention. Both billabong and dissension/dissention derive from sources foreign to English, the former from Australian Aborigines of a certain locale, the latter from ancient mother Latin. And so what?! You can counterclaim that all you want, Jess. I'd rather subscribe to accepted authority. You are not an accepted authority ... on either billabong or dissension/dissention. You manufacture but another faux (another English/American word, though deriving/being captured from the more original French) argument. At least you're being consistent, since that is, after all, your style, a common, highly predictable behavior of yours. English, as are all other languages on the planet (at least to some degree), is alive and lives in a state of constant flux, of evolution. It is not isolated and living hermitlike on a desert island ... one even perhaps the size of all Australia. Yours, Chuck