Maia: “Mum,
I have no idea what Mr. A said about my work today. He said something, but I
don’t know if it was good or bad.”
Me: “You
couldn’t hear him?”
Maia: “I
heard him fine. But it sounded like a foreign language…”
When we
enrolled Maia in school one of the questions for foreign students was, “will
your child need a translator?” We joked that yes, between the Queensland accent and the heavy use of
slang, she just might need someone to interpret the ‘Strine. We weren’t really
serious…
The thing
with the Aussie language is it’s excellent fun to listen to, while
eavesdropping. It’s liberally sprinkled with mate, g’day, reckon and heaps as
well as barbie, bikkie and bogan, arvos, avos and ambos—and after a
few tries we got those. The thing-o seems to be if you can shorten a word—you
do (sandwich becomes sanger, petrol station becomes servo, Salvation Army
Stores become Salvos, bathing suit becomes bathers). Australians, it seems, are
lazy…
It’s one
thing to truncate a word—it doesn’t take too long to figure out that a snag is a
sausage, a yewy is a u-turn (though you don’t want to be sorting that one out
in the moment—as in “quick, do a yewy”…), a sickie is a day off, a mozzie is a
mosquito and a journo is a journalist. But where we struggle is with the words
and slang that are sort of random—it took us a while to realize an
op-shop is a thrift store, being shouted a drink was a good thing, and that an
eskie is a cooler. I’m still not certain what daggy is and think I may be using
fair dinkum wrong.
Maia
explained her teacher looked at her work and said something which may or may
not have been a compliment. And she was uncertain, should she have said
thank-you or sorry? Then she shrugged it off, “I reckon
she’ll be right, mum. He said ‘sweet as’ as part of the words.”
