Stone The Crows, I'm Flat Out Like A Lizard Drinking*

By Alli Sinclair


When I send an email to my non-Australian friends, sometimes I think I should include a glossary of terms. It’s common for me to receive a reply with “please explain” asterisks dotted throughout the document. I certainly know what “proper English” is. After all, I’m qualified to teach English as a second language. But when it comes to casual letters or conversations, I let my Aussieness show through and that’s when the fun begins.

In fact, it reminds me of when native Spanish speakers taught me their language and had a ball messing with my head. They’d teach me all sorts of loopy phrases that I innocently learnt and then tried out on their parents. The raised eyebrows and dropped jaws made me realise I’d just made a clanger. Mind you, my friends would be on the floor, rolling around in fits of laughter.

I do get the chance to turn the tables every now and again and yeah, I can see why my Spanish speaking friends found it so much fun. But when it comes to the serious stuff, like my writing, I need to really think about what I want to write and how I need to write it.

My main characters in my novels are Australian. I like putting an Aussie on the world stage as I find their personalities and lyrical way of speaking interesting and fun to play with. But there are some hazards. The last thing I want to do is have my characters sound like Crocodile Dundee. I love that movie and it did do a lot for Australian tourism, but seriously, we don’t speak like that. Nor do we go for a walkabout in the desert. Well, some people do, but it’s not a regular occurrence. I could go on and on about stereotypes, but that’s not this week’s topic so I better move on!

Because I want to dominate the world and have my books available in every country... actually, scrap that. I want to have them available in every galaxy (yes, sarcasm is a major part of being an Aussie), I have to make sure people can actually understand what I’m writing. If I fill the pages with Australian phrases and terms, no one will understand what I’m writing about. But if I don’t add the odd Aussie saying in, then people think my character is English or American. It’s a fine balance and that’s why I’m so thankful for my wonderful critique partners. They read my work with a non-Australian slant, and they’re smart enough to get what the slang means. But every now and then I put in a curly one that leaves them scratching their heads. It’s a constant balancing act and one I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on—now.

A lot of Australian slang derives from England, and of course there are many phrases and terms we use that are North American. As you know, Australia is a multi-cultural country, so we also have a lot of words that have been adapted from a myriad of nations. We enjoy adopting foreign words and turning them into our own. I do, however, feel for people who grace our shores for the first time, especially those who have English as a second language. Lina wrote a wonderful post about her adventure in learning English and how difficult it was. Throw some Aussie slang and a thick accent in, and you have a recipe for disaster. But rest assured, Aussies are a friendly bunch who are accustomed getting blank looks after we speak, so we’ll find another way to get the message across, even if it means getting out a piece of paper and crayons.

And of course, I couldn’t finish the post without sharing some of my favourite words and sayings. But be aware, some of these haven’t been used for decades. Go on, give them a whirl!

Cactus: something that is dead, e.g. the bloody TV is cactus

Chook: chicken

Cleanskin: A bottle of wine bought without the label on it. Usually bought from companies that have an abundance of a certain vintage of wine.

Coathanger: Sydney Harbour Bridge

Mad as a cut snake: very angry

Dag: technically the yucky bit that hangs off a sheep’s bum, but in Australia a dag is a funny person

Earbashing: nagging

Feral: hippie

Furphy: false or untrue e.g. she’s told the biggest furphy

Grundies: underwear

Mystery bag: a sausage (also called a snag)

Nuff-nuff:  not very intelligent

Rack off: go away (not that polite)

Root rat: someone constantly looking for sex

Screamer: someone who gets drunk easily e.g. “She’s a two pot screamer” refers to someone who gets drunk on two glasses of beer

Show pony: someone who dresses to impress

Tall poppies: successful people 

Tall poppy syndrome: someone who talks badly about those successful people

Woop Woop: invented name for a small, unimportant town e.g. he lives out near Woop Woop

*Oh my, I am very busy

A Linguistic Marriage

It’s fascinating how words move from one language to another. Why and how they move can be enlightening and often down right funny. English and Italian have a close relationship even though English is not classified as a Latin-based language. The connection comes in part from the years that Julius Caesar and his troops spent on the British Isles.

Take the word tooth, for example. It comes to us from Old English, but the Italian, dente, comes from Latin. From that root in English we have dentist, dental, dentifrice, etc. Likewise, the word hard in English is duro in Italian. It’s Latin root gives us durable, duration, duress, and endure.

English speakers learning Italian and Italians learning English have to be wary of “false friends,” words that appear to be the same, but aren’t. In Italian, the word for farm is fattoria; many Italian students of English think fattoria is factory. Other examples are more confusing: sensibile in Italian means sensitive. A sensible person in Italian is described as being di buonsenso. And if you want to order prosciutto without preservatives, say senza conservante because preservativo means condom.

In general, Italians love to use English words, but they often get them wrong. Last year on my other blog, Italian Intrigues, I wrote a piece about the Titty Bar. It’s not topless; in fact, the name is intended to conjure up a warm, family feeling. In this case, the name has as much to do with pronunciation as meaning. But it makes English speakers smile.

Often, an English word migrates into Italian to perform one narrowly defined task. Take chat, for example. Italian has a perfectly good word, chiacchierata, that is virtually equal in meaning to the English word. When the practice of Internet chat emerged, the English word was adopted, but only for Internet chat. Thus when someone says to me, “I was chatting with my friends,” I have a mental image of people talking face to face while they mean keyboard to keyboard.

Piercing and lifting are two other words that have narrow meanings in Italian. The first is body piercing, the second a face lift (or beauty products purported to have face lift properties). I once helped an Italian jewelry designer develop a presentation about her work in English. She had designed a line of gold jewelry in which the metal had been pierced to make intricate designs. She refused to believe that pierce was the correct word, and even after I showed her in the bilingual dictionary, her preconceived reaction to the word made it impossible for her to use it. We had to find another, more complex, way of describing her work.

Italians immigrating to America developed a slang that combined their own language with the new one. A classic example is Dean Martin singing about pasta fazool in “That’s Amore.” He was singing about an Italian dish called pasta e fagiole (pasta and beans).

Image from Western Connecticut State University

In Italian, a photographic camera is a macchina fotografica. Simple. Descriptive. But how we English speakers came to use camera for the same mechanism is quite interesting. It’s the Italian word for room. Camera di letto, bedroom; camera di pranzo, dining room. So how did camera come to mean macchina fotografica in English?

Before the invention of film, artists could record images by constructing a “room” outside, known as a camera obscura, dark room. Light passing through a small hole was reflected onto the opposite wall. It was upside down, but it maintained perspective. Artists could then trace the reflected image for an accurate record of the scene. Later, a box with mirrors to reverse the image was constructed, and the camera as we know it was born.

Know of any other languages that play tricks on your comprehension?