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American Australian Howard Manns went to the shop to buy what Americans call “tater tots” and discovered they were what Coles calls “potato royals”. A more common word in Australia is “potato gem”. In Victoria they are “potato cakes”, in NSW “potato scallops”, and someone from South Australian thinks these are called “potato fritters”. For discussion of this and more see https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/24/1385017
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Kate Burridge points out that when Ozzies love an expression, they play with it. No worries has generated numerous remodelled versions – notably, gloriously truncated nurries, and the more complex no wuckers/no wucks, two truncated spoonerised versions (from no fucking worries -> no wucking furries -> no wuckers/no wucks). No wuckers also shows the -ers ending, a double diminutive sometimes added to adjectives (like chockers, ‘chock-a-block’; preggers, ‘pregnant’), and also to nicknames (one of my school nicknames, Budge, was occasionally transformed – I like to think, affectionately – to Budgers). And there is more to entertain you at https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/18/1384986
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Gary Nunn, on 26 May 2020 posted on munter, munted, no can do, stan, woke, queer and karen. Howie Manns has commented “Not sure about some of these etymologies, but Gary’s heart is in the right place”.
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Simon Musgrave advises that the overall picture is that there are slang expressions we know as speakers of Australian English and that can be explicitly identified as such, but that the explicitly identified items by no means exhaust our knowledge.
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Isabelle Burke likes that some slang phrases resemble ripped jeans – not only do they rapidly ping-pong in and out of fashion, but they appear to have several important chunks missing, for example “easy as”, “funny as”, “big as”, “sweet as”. She loves slang’s ability to insouciantly sidestep seemingly inviolable rules of grammar.
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