A sheila's still a sheila, mate

By Susan Butler
October 15, 2005

THE notion that Australians use more slang than other English speakers springs from our habit of using slang when others stick to the formalities. This makes our slang more noticeable. Where others say "How do you do", and continue in that formal vein, Australians shift quickly to some colloquial expression, just to reassure the listener that they are not putting on airs and graces. Long held notions of egalitarianism live on in our speaking habits.

A primary function of slang is to show that you belong to a group and to allow sympathy between speakers to develop in a relaxed fashion. Australians, particularly men, would squirm with discomfort if a stiff manner was adopted beyond the brief limits established in our normal habits of address. The reverse is true for English speakers from other countries. Cultures which stress the importance of language formality as a way of not intruding on someone's "space" can find our directness confronting. And so we get our reputation for having more slang than anyone else.

This reputation sits oddly beside our own conviction that we have no slang left at all because of the inroads of American English. The latest haul of American imports includes alpha geek, babelicious, beer goggles, bling-bling, pointy-head and skanky ho. The trickle that began with World War II has turned into a flood. We are not alone in feeling that the traffic is all one way - from American English to the rest of the English-speaking world, but that doesn't make us any happier about it.

We can comfort ourselves that the roots of our slang go deep and will always provide a natural barrier to wholesale adoption of imported slang. That sense of belonging to a community which understands, as no one else does, the special meanings and connotations of Australian English produces such items as beer o'clock, budgie smugglers, chicky-babe, dish licker, hornbag, pash rash and snot block.

Regionalisms still abound - words like schnitter (South Australian for a sandwich) and nointer (Tasmanian for a spoiled brat). With the onslaught of American English, we seem to cherish our localism all the more. Just below the surface of the standard Australian English in our newspapers and on our radio and TV there is a thriving regional creativity as seen in Australian Wordmap (abc.net.au/wordmap).

We could have succumbed to the American water-cooler topic, but no - our Prime Minister came to the rescue with barbecue stopper. Even when we take from America we don't necessarily stick with the American meaning. Pash as a shortened form of passion is an early 20th-century US colloquialism which we acquired after World War II. It had the meaning of "infatuation". We turned to have a pash on someone into the more vigorous pastime of pashing someone off. The fourth edition of the Macquarie Dictionary records "pash" and "dash", the stratagem of kissing a stranger that you fancy at a party and then running away, and "pash rash", the rash around the mouth that comes from too much pashing. Below this layer of contemporary slang there lies the ballast of traditional items like bloke, go for a burton, chiack, chook, duffer, dunny, flummox, a fluke, fossick, mollydooker, nincompoop, Rafferty's rules, the rozzers, a skerrick, sook, tiddler and wonky. Many of these are derived from British dialect but they have come to feature in Australian English, whereas they are largely ignored in British English. Listen to Australian radio and you will find they are still going strong.

The other thing that distinguishes Aussie slang is its black humour, with a constant downplaying of events and downsizing of people. This edge comes from our colonial origins, where grim humour was a strategy for coping with grim situations. It is particularly evident in phrases allowing for an allusive surprise such as variations on useful as - for example, a bucket under a bull or an ashtray on a motorbike.

There is no way of measuring slang in different language varieties, but it may be that we all have an equal need for a style of language that gives us a sense of solidarity. In Australia it is a mix of what we have inherited from British colloquialism topped up with American English combined with what we have created for ourselves.

Never mind where the words come from, it's what you do with them that counts.

Yes, we are exposed to the homogenised - and largely Americanised - drift of English around the world as never before, but we still make linguistic choices that reflect our culture, our history, our simple preferences. While we do that, Australian English is still our own.

Susan Butler is the publisher of the fourth edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, to be released at the end of the month.
