diseonfire:
armoured-escort:
lexxicona:
k-loulee:
fozmeadows:
hollowedskin:
derinthemadscientist:
languageoclock:
deflare:
penfairy:
Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
case in point: the ‘Howard DJs like a mad cunt’ meme.
I recommend this bloody good article by Mark Di Stefano of Buzzfeed Australia about the origin of John Howard’s DJ skills: We Found The Guy Behind Australia’s Greatest Ever Meme.
@armoured-escort
AUSTRAILIA WHY
SOMEBODY PLEASE EXPLAIN
ALSO I’M SORRY IF I KEEP TAGGING YOU IN AUSTRAILIAN RELATED SHIT
BUT YOU”RE THE ONLY AUSTRAILIAN I KNOW
AND I MUST VERIFY
It’s all true, believe me. I reckon it has something to do with being geographically isolated and having a massive convict background during colonisation. Then you have huge immigration influxes from all over the world, and the fact that we like to shorten names into things like “Dazza”, “Maccas”, and “Shaz.”
Also, when they shout “Fang It!” in Mad Max Fury Road, that is a thing that is regularly shouted in the suburbs.
I don’t know why we evolved our language like this.
I’d wager a portion of it comes from the social structure originally applied to the country. Because so much of the population were convicts, the society built up around the notion of fighting authority or at least resisting it in some fashion. A lot of people came from poverty, obviously (because why the hell else would you be in prison for stealing bread?), lacked formal education and were illiterate. There was a tie-in with the influx of rural people in Britain looking for work if I remember correctly, which fed this problem of overcrowding in prisons in the first place. The point is that a large chunk of the prison population were poor, disenfranchised, from a certain geographical area or social group disproportionately affected by law enforcement.
For awhile (in the 1800′s there around) people from other countries joked you could tell if a person was Australian because of how they walked (the iron ball and chain).
And most of Australia’s current terminologies for homesteads and things were built around military or police terminology (that’s why we have stations, homesteads etc. instead of farms or ranches, whatever). Slang that was common to local dialects or communities (cockney for example) stuck around, presumably because a fair few of these people were poor and ran afoul of the law. So already just at Australia’s founding you have a culture that hates people in power. And my guess is that fed an attitude of disdain for authority in any form and a camaraderie towards those in the same boat as you. Social structures (and later political structures) reformed to favour or support the people fucked over by the system.
Which leads to the idea if you’re one of us, you’re a mate and we can slag you but we’ll act very nice to you if you’re in power but we all know how we really think of you.