The Friday Fillip: Strine

I’ve recently returned from a trip to the Antipodes — my first. It was thoroughly enjoyable, despite a few minor obstacles, such as surviving a 14-hour flight and a 24-hour travel day, driving on the left, evading roos on the road at twilight, confronting electricity outlets that all looked like miniature cartoons of The Scream, and doing without my smartphone because of the insanely high cost of data roaming.

Oh, and struggling a bit to understand the locals.

That started on the Air New Zealand flight to Auckland, when, with ears that needed to pop, I swore I heard a flight attendant announce “Say hi to Mike,” followed a moment later by “Panna cotta for Tom.” Later, in Australia, I became somewhat accustomed to the local accent and even began to try to imitate it discreetly. One good place to start was the typical greeting, which, all reports of “G’day” to the contrary, was “How are you going?” Now of course it wasn’t said with full articulation, anymore than Toronto is properly pronounced “Toe Ron Toe.” No, it was slurred quickly in a way I couldn’t get until someone explained that when he’d immigrated he’d been told to say, simply, “Air gun,” with a slightly rising inflection. That worked.

In fact there’s a whole method of speaking Australian based in using the mid-Atlantic pronunciation of various English words. “Let Stalk Strine” was a hilarious book published by “Afferbeck Lauder” in 1965, I think, and still available online. Here are samples of what I mean, taken from a couple of websites that have abstracted some examples, so you’ll get the idea:

emma chisit? [how much is it?]
muspy summer stike [must be some mistake]
less jar soap [let’s just hope]
air fridge [average]
where cheque etcher big blue wise? [where did you get your big blue eyes?]
sinny [Sidney]

Of course, there’s another layer to being a linguistic local, and that is managing the slang. I wasn’t in Australia long enough to master more than one or two expressions — “bottle shop” for liquor store, “grog” for booze, “schooner” which is a beer glass of a certain size (large in Queensland and medium in New South Wales), and because one must eat, “avo” for avocado, “chook” for chicken, and (mea culpa) “mackers” for McDonalds. But I think you’ll enjoy looking at the (long) list of Aussie slang on the Koala Net site. Some of it isn’t really unique to Australia: I’ve used “ankle biter,” “bush,” “gobsmacked,” “bog standard,” and “moolah,” for example. But a whole lot of it is very Aussie and really funny. “Dingo’s breakfast” for instance : a yawn, a leak and a good look round (i.e. no breakfast), or “Chuck a sickie” : take the day off sick from work when you’re perfectly healthy.

Let me close with an example of local language confusion from another land down under — Brasil, in this case. It comes from the current Johnson column, the Economist’s blog on language. It struck me as a kind of “Say hi to mike” sort of thing.

What Brazilians say(in strongly accented English, on first meeting a foreigner): Where is the book?
What foreigners hear: The confusion is impossible to describe
What Brazilians mean: Hello! You’re foreign! I’m friendly!
(Explanation: For reasons lost in the mist of time, a Brazilian’s very first English lesson starts with the two phrases, “Where is the book?” and “The book is on the table”. So if a Brazilian says the first to you, just respond with the second and you will have made a new friend.)