Two nations divided by a common language

G'day

Ok, so the quote above (from Oscar Wilde) was about the linguistic differences between Britain and the United States but it could just as easily apply to Britain and Australia. Take for example the following sentences:
"Look, despite the GFC making me a bit short of money I decided that it was time for a new doona so I headed to the shop's Manchester department. There'd been a cool change mid arvo so I didn't wear my thongs. When I got to the Manchester department the Gen Y assistant talked around the different doonas so much that I thought we'd end up having a blue. In the end I bought the least daggy one. If we had had a blue he wouldn't have stood a Buckley's."

While it's highly unlikley you'd ever hear the above said by anyone it does give a taste of just how different Australian English can be. Any Aussie would understand the whole thing but for the benefit of non-Aussie readers here's a breakdown of the vocab.

• Look - same meaning as in British English but, as previously mentioned, uttered at the start of every sentence whether there's something to actually look at or not.
• GFC - global financial crisis. The rest of the world had recessions but not Australia (the economy here remained very strong) so instead of calling the whole economic meltdown a recession they coined the term global financial crisis and then (obviously - they do it with everything else) reduced it to the initialism GFC.
• Doona - a duvet (etymological root unknown).
• Manchester - the bedding section of a shop, not the city in northwest England (though possibly that's where the expression comes from as 19th-century Manchester was the world's major cotton producer and so responsile for sheets, pillow cases etc).
• Cool change - after a really hot day the wind can suddenly swing round from a hot northerly to a much fresher southerly. The drop in temperature is called a cool change.
• Thongs - flip-flops
• Gen Y - everyone's heard of Generation X but now (at least in Oz) there's Generation Y too, bascially those annoying teens who use 'like' every third word in a sentence and act as if the world owes them something.
• Talk around - to talk about (used excessively and with seemingly no realisation of the fact that if you talk around something you're actually not talking about it at all - get your prepositions right Australia!)
• Having a blue - to have a fight
• Daggy - grotty, sleazy
• A Buckley's - no chance at all (after the escaped convict who, despite not having much chance of surviving in the wild, did survive - see last post - so I'm not sure how this expression works)

So as you can see there are quite a few things Aussies say that are unintelligible to the rest of us. And there are some things we think they say, but actually they don't:

• Ripper
• Bonza
• Fair dinkum (actually I've heard this said once)
• Can you tell what it is yet? (Rolf's most famous phrase is unknown to his compatriots)

And that's it for now - weather's got better so I'm going to make the most of it - but if you're interested in checking out some more Australianisms click on this link.

G'bye!

Cliff