The Australian Language

I'm slowly recovering from my trip of a lifetime and will begin posting tidbits about my trip. This first post is about the language in Australia.

Well, it's Englishie. All nouns in Australia have the suffix “ie.” Or in other words, if it has “ie” at the end, it came from Australia. Barbie (barbq), bikies (motorcyclists), blowies (no, it's not what you think! It's large flies), sickie (day off work ill), postie (mailman), rellie (relatives) and so on. It becomes rather entertaining after three weeks when you still discover new words with the suffix 'ie'. It's as if all Australians engage in baby talk. Very adorable.

Of course there are a lot of other terms that had us baffled and we were forced to pay attention or hide our shock when we heard some words.

Swimmers – these aren’t people. These are the things you wear when you go swimming.

And then there's the seven year old who was getting prepared to go out with us on a Catamaran sail. As my husband and I were standing in the kitchen talking to my relatives, she came to us and proudly announced, "I'm wearing thongs today!" My husband looked at me, I looked at him, then we both looked at her mother thinking, "What type of a mother ARE you encouraging your daughter to wear thongs at such an age???" But we kept our mouths shut. And a good thing we did, because shortly thereafter the eleven year old and thirteen year old boys announced the same! This is when we had a quizzical look on our faces. Thank dog, one of them was actually demonstrating where his thongs were. You could have heard the huge sigh of relief from my husband and I as we looked at him waving his flip-flops in the air.

When we went out shopping one day we saw a funny shirt with a saying on it that seemed fit to get for my best friend and her husband of New Zealand. We went back home and told our relative about the shirt because we thought it was very funny. As my husband tried to recall the print on the shirt, he told my 80+ old relative that it said, "I root for two teams: The Wallabies and any team that plays against the All Blacks." (This is in reference to the rugby teams from Australia and New Zealand). As soon as my husband said that, my relative frowned, crossed her arms and shook her head saying, "We DON'T USE THIS LANGUAGE IN THIS HOUSE! I'm very surprised they had this shirt for sale there!!!" My husband and I were shocked to say the least. I looked at him, he looked at me. So gently I said, "All Blacks?" She shook her head and said, "No." Feeling confused I said, "Wallabies?" Again she shook her head and said, "No. And don't make me use that word! You KNOW what I'm talking about." I was totally clueless at this point and decided to ask her sons later that evening instead. I continued to talk to her, as my husband went to our room and looked through our tourist guide (thank dog for Lonely Planet!). He returned to the room and slid the book under my nose pointing to the dictionary and there it was...

Root - Having sexual intercourse.

Yes, we had quite a bit of fun since we've learned this Australian word. And her sons had quite a good laugh when we told them about this embarrassing moment with their mom.

We won't be rooting for anyone older than 80 anymore!

After telling a friend about this last story, she wrote back:
That was one of my favorite lines from the Melbourne bid for Worldcon in 1999. Clueless Americans would come up to the Aussie support table and say, "We're rooting for you to win!" and the Australians would blink, look a bit surprised, and say something like, "Really, that's more effort than is necessary. A $10 pre-support will be enough."