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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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Howard Manns writes that the best thing about Australian words is that they are our words, and other people don’t know them. You can call an American a galah, and they won’t know what you mean. Old cobbers will have their drongos and galahs, but the ankle-biters are conjuring a new wave of lexical innovations for the next generation of boofheads; the Australian lexicon is changing, but it’s not dying. Young people use a wider variety of words for “stupid”,
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Keith Allan discusses the oirgins of the slang term bloody which an Australian government minister promulgated as ‘plain speaking and friendly. It is our vernacular’. There have been different attitudes towards the use of bloody over the last three centuries. https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/07/12/1384862
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Simon Musgrave takes a deep dive into Australian culture, invention and creativity with a complete record of English as it is used from the Member’s Box of the MCG to the change rooms of the Betoota Dolphins rugby league club. https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/07/05/1384853
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Kate Burridge discusses all those wild stabs in the back, those white elephants in the room, those barnacles grabbing onto the wheels of progress – these “frankenphrases” might seem a hotchpotch of ill-matched bits and pieces, but there’s no doubt they grab your attention.
https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/06/28/1384830
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Dylan Hughes writes that a key part of Australian “slanguage” is the diversity of idiomatic expressions, shortened forms, and unique words. And he identifies a few that stand out as exceptionally Australian.
https://lens.monash.edu/2022/06/21/1384811
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Isabelle Burke shows us that no matter your age or your beer-money budget, there’s a native Aussie term for your amber fluid.
https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/06/14/1384755
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Howard Manns admits ‘I was in my opening weeks of living in Melbourne. I had finally gotten around to making a few friends. One of those friends texted me: “Let’s meet on Sydney Road in the arvo.” I’m embarrassed to say how much time I spent walking around on Sydney Road looking for a café called “The Arvo”.’
https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/06/07/1384729
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Howard Manns & Kate Burridge reflect on sangers, splayds, fly-swatting; wowsers, surfies and burkinis; swags, billies and bush.
https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/01/05/1384287
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La Trobe University Linguistics program has hosted a forum on Englishes in Australia for four years now – our thanks to the dedicated people who have made this event a regular feature of the linguistics scene in Australia. This year’s event took place on August 27 and our team (in different combinations) presented on two topics in the forum: