So, after having some time for a long-overdue update this afternoon, I found myself spending the rest of my day searching for blogs online about Australia. One blog post I read reminded me of the uniqueness of Aussie slang. I am proud to say that after being surrounded by Aussies for several weeks without any concentrated contact with Americans, I have picked up (or at least am able to understand) some of the common lingo.
A common greeting that I had to get used to hearing was How you going in place of, say, What's up or How're you doing? Reading it doesn't seem so different, but hearing it out loud makes you hesitate for a second, I swear! I also learned that tea is another way of saying dinner, dodgy is the preferred descriptive term used over shady or ghetto, and that there is a lot of reckoning going on.
Also, a piece of advice: be very careful when using the word root. If you tell a group of Aussie boys that you're rooting [for] the home team, they'll have a laugh... and may conjure up an image that you weren't intending to create!
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2 comments:
HAHA! This is fantastic! It made me do a little LOL-ing. How you going sounds so funny out loud because they say it like "howyagoin" as if it's one syllable. Or at least my aussies do! I had to get used to "arvo" for afternoon and "catch-up" for "date."
I'd get stuck on a date and be like - BUT I THOUGHT WE WERE JUST CATCHING UP!! Of course catching up can also be a non-date but I got stuck many times before I could discern the difference between a "catch-up" and a CATCH-UP.
"Catch-up" in exchange for "date" - that's definitely a good one for me to note ahead of time, as I can very easily see myself getting tangled in situations. Thanks for the heads up!
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