Let Stalk Strine

[Giddy Goat]

G'day Jine...Can we have a few phrases in 'Strine' in the Cafe for anyone venturing out to Oz?

G'day all - in response to Crystal's request, (thanks for the suggestion Chrissy)and in case any of youse missed the link I gave earlier today on another thread, here it is. There's nothing worse than travelling in a foreign country and being unable to make oneself understood ...

http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/bev2000/strine.htm

[Guest3]

Much more fun than learning Spanish!!

arvo. Afternoon.
barney. Row, fight, argument.
bizo. Business.
bloke. Man.
blue. row, fight.
corker. Great.
crook. Mad. Also sick.
dunny. A more primitive type of toilet, usually locted outdoors.
fair dinkum. Genuine, real, really.
fair go. Fair chance.
grog. Beer, liquor.
half your luck. Congratulations.
lair. One of brash or vulgar behavior, usually flashily dressed as well.
loo. Toilet.
mate. Friend, pal, colleague.
middy. Middle-sized glass. A middy usually contains 285ml (of beer).
mug. Someone taken advantage of.
pissed. Drunk.
pissed off. Angry, mad.
plonk. Cheap liquor or wine.
rack off. Scram, get lost.
ripper. Great, something great.
schooner. A larger glass for beer, larger than a middy.
shout. pay for a round (of drinks).
sport. Something like mate, but sometimes said with some belligerence.
Strine. Australian as she's spoke.
ta. Thanks.
tucker. Food.
wowser. Prude, puritan.
yobbo. Someone a bit uncouth.

[Giddy Goat]

Thanks for those additions Chrissy! Some of them are also heard in the UK so it would be interesting to know where they were accepted into common usage first. Possibly many were exported by the first lot of convicts.

Barry Humphries introduced some great phrases into the local lingo - a 'tube' of Fosters was one of his I think, also known as a stubby, but two of my favorites were 'technicolour yawn' (politely, something you may experience after too many tubes), and 'knuckle sandwich', something you might give someone else after too many tubes. This happened soon after the 'six o'clock swill', when pubs used to close, and there was a race to get rinsed before last call. It's been a while since I lived in Oz, so the language has moved on massively even since then! So if anyone's got more recent experience, I'm all ears.

As some of you are only too keen to point out....

[cromercrabholiday]

[quote="Crystal"]
middy. Middle-sized glass. A middy usually contains 285ml (of beer).
quote]

What kind of officialdom creates a glass that contains 285ml of beer? Is it a translation from old money?

John

[alexia s.]

"loo. Toilet"
Is this right? I've never heard an Australian say "loo", although it's frequently used in England . I've heard "lavatory" (considered lower class in Oz & upper class in England - sorry to use this offensive classification) &" toilet" (considered lower class in England & upper class in Oz - sorry again), as well as "dunny".

[cromercrabholiday]

"loo. Toilet"
Is this right? I've never heard an Australian say "loo", although it's frequently used in England . I've heard "lavatory" (considered lower class in Oz & upper class in England - sorry to use this offensive classification) &" toilet" (considered lower class in England & upper class in Oz - sorry again), as well as "dunny".

Slightly off-topic, but when I was doing my OU French course one module was French variants, including Quebecoise. The word that amused me most was la becouse - this is the same as a dunny and is a straight translation of the American "backhouse", a small shed away from the main living accommodation.

John

[Giddy Goat]

Crystal - g'day - Alexia's right, 'loo' wasn't in use when I was in Oz, but maybe it is now, as more and more Brits settle there and influence the lingo. It was simply 'toilet'.

Goats - yep, 'fraid to say there are quite a few of us in Oz. Here's another little link to learn more. I regret there's no singing or fainting on this one though, nor any samples of Strine.

http://library.thinkquest.org/03oct/001 ... istory.htm

I left before the dingoes could catch up with me.

John, 'la becouse' sounds flash - but I guess anything in French does. Even 'vomissement'!

And thinking about middies, half a pint comes out at about 285 ml. My guess is that the word 'middy' must have been derived from 'half'.

Seeyerlader!
 

[alexia s.]

Jane, what do you mean, "as more and more Brits settle there"??????? The whole country was settled by the Brits; even the accent is believed to be a relic of a 19th century London accent! In reality, fewer & fewer Brits are settling there - parts of Sydney are known as "little Hong Kong" today.

[alexia s.]

ps You're right - "vomissement" sounds like a word from a French surrealist poem. in fact, it probably IS a word from a French surrealist poem.

[Giddy Goat]

Alexia - trust a lawyer to want to split cheveux, you're just like my husband!! By Brits, I meant new arrivals, as opposed to those with Brit ancestry. But yes, you're more in touch with recent immigration trends there than I am by the sound of it.

I'm sure there are a lot of similarities between Cockney and Strine. BTW, have you heard of 'P and O' accent?

[Guest3]

Well...in my defence .....got this ditty of glossary from a 'Strine' website!

http://goaustralia.about.com/cs/language/a/strinel.htm

[Guest3]

BTW....What's a P & O accent??

[Giddy Goat]

Crystal, if you've had access to a recent resource on the subject of Strine, then it confirms that the lingo has moved on since Alexia and I lived there.

P&O accent. I trained in the days when more people travelled abroad from Oz by sea than by air. Our phonetics lecturer spoke of the 'P&O accent', as amongst his colleagues it had become a recognisable entity in the more pretentious Australian traveller, returning fresh off a liner from a 'Women's Weekly World Discovery Tour' or similar. It seemed as if they'd subconsciously affected a bit of upper class English accent, in the spirit of Hyacinth Bouquet. But in spite of themselves, the Strine overtones were still discernible!

Poor Aussies - I think our self confidence has moved on somewhat since those days.

[Loopy Lou]

Dearest Jane,

I am frightfully P&O dontcha know! In fact I travelled P&O out to India in my far distant youth. That was a fantastic 2-week trip for a 6 year old girl! I remember the steward walking up and down the corridors with his little zylophone ringing passengers in to first or second sitting for meals - sounds like something out of the last century, doesn't it? Hang on - it was last century!!! It used to take 24 hours and 4 stops to fly from Delhi to London when I was a boarding school BOAC Junior Jet Club traveller.

You could almost call me an "OK ya" sort of person as I was born in Kensington, but I swear like a navvy!

I've been to Sydney in more recent times and loved it! Young people are supposed to give up their seats on public transport for their elders and betters and you can still clip kids around the ear for misdemeanours. They still have some common sense, unlike some elements in the UK. Fantastic!

Sorry - off subject.

Loopy

[Giddy Goat]

I've been to Sydney in more recent times and loved it! Young people are supposed to give up their seats on public transport for their elders and betters and you can still clip kids around the ear for misdemeanours. They still have some common sense, unlike some elements in the UK. Fantastic!

Sorry - off subject

No Loopy Lou, you're well and truly on the point with this, and thank you! There's a lot for Aussies to be proud of, so I do hope they're (we're) outgrowing some of that previous inferiority complex we had about our nation in certain respects. The culcher scene for instance. We used to be considered a culcheral desert, and couldn't argue with it - but not now!