HOBBIES
AUSTRALIAN SLANG
The popularity of Australian soaps such as Neighbours and Home and Away, not to mention Dame Edna Everedge, has brought a whole new language to our TV screens and even to our own everyday speech.
One of the regular contributors to Grumpy Old Men got very grumpy over the fact that English people now speak like Australians by raising the voice slightly and ending every sentence as if its a question?
To better understand the Australian vernacular try this: An Aussie in a cozzie who doesn’t know the meaning of a hizzie in the hozzie might feel a shade out of place. About as inconspicuous as Liberace at a wharfies picnic.
Roughly translated: A wharfie is a docker; a hizzle is a hysterectomy ;a hozzie is a hospital, a cozzie is a swimming costume. An Aussie is an Aussie and Liberace is Liberace (for younger readers a somewhat effiminate and over coiffeured American pianist who never performed without a dinner suit and candelabra).
One other avenue to explore are the cartoon strips featuring the innocent Australian
Barry McKenzie as he struggles to make himself understood in a strange country (England)
where they don't speak the language of his homeland.
That should make the average truckie, taking a perve, with a verandah over his toy shop, as happy as a bastard on Fathers Day. Such English could make purists as mad as a gumtree full of galahs.
A truckie is a lorry driver; to perve is to gaze lustfully; the verandah in question is a paunch; toy shop is best left to the imagination; a galah is a galah, a pink Australian cockatoo.
Esperanto -