2 Texans Down Under

Just when I think I’ve begun to understand my Brisbane friends and neighbours (Aussie spelling), I make the mistake of visiting Bunnings, a sort of down under version of Home Depot or Lowes, and ask a sales clerk where I can find a pair of pruning shears.

“You want ___?” she asks. At that moment any attempt on my part to spell out what she’d just said would have been utterly futile. I ask her to repeat that seemingly random collection of sounds, but what I hear the second time still causes no linking of synapses in my brain.

“Maybe so,” I say and follow her down an aisle until we come to a display of pliers-like clippers, most of which have labels containing the word “secateur.” Sec-ah-tour. A brand new word for me, but I thank my helper and leave with a “pruner” identified by its manufacturer as a “bi-pass secateur.” With it I can cut twigs.

This expansion of my vocabulary came only moments after a clerk in the plumbing department had asked me if I own a “shifting spanner.” Damned if I know, I thought, but after a bit of discussion I realized that I do, indeed, have a shifting spanner, a couple of them, actually. I just call them crescent wrenches.

English is supposed to evolve, I know, and I’ve run into region-based differences before. The first time I ordered coffee in New England, for example, the waitress asked if I wanted it “regular,” and I said I did, since coffee comes regularly fresh from the pot and unadulterated. Mistake. In those pre-latte days in Boston “regular coffee” came with milk in it. In other words, ruined.

In Australia, though, the evolution of our common language seems as divergent, at times, as the evolution of trees that shed their bark in winter while keeping their leaves.

Kate Veitch, author of an Aussie novel called “Listen” that is being made available in the US as “Without a Backward Glance,” says she was almost brought to tears Read the rest of this entry »