Archive for October 19th, 2007
A family, a caravan, and a year
October 19, 2007A challenge for you, if you’re accustomed to American English. Translate this paragraph, please:
“Well what a week this has been. We finally packed the house and got away in nice time. We made it uneventfully that arvo to Glen Inness and again towards Newcastle when all of a sudden the car goes POP and we were looking at a blown turbo…”
Anyone given to shortening words, as Australians tend to be, might write “turbo” for “turbocharger,” defined in my “Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary” as “a supercharger driven by a turbine powered by the engine’s exhaust gases.”
But “arvo?” It took us a while to figure out, once we’d moved to Brisbane, that arvo is Australian for “afternoon.” Just like “avos” is short for avacados, “Salvos” is the local term for Salvation Army, and “prezzies” (also “pressies”) means gifts.
See how migrating to the Land of Oz keeps a person on his toes?
Anyway, the blown turbo turned out to be something less serious and the story of one family’s year-long car trip around Australia got off to a good start. You can read all about it at a blog posted by Annett Kruse: http://duffkruse.blogspot.com . The sentence Read the rest of this entry »