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 when she got an edited manuscript back from New York and saw that “big noting yourself” might be rendered as “bragging” and that “a beaut bloke” could turn into a great guy, or that a strong man might lose his Mallee and become simply fit as a bull.”

The NY editor, Veitch complains in an article in the “Weekend Australian” book section, an article I finished just before I went out to Bunnings, even wanted to translate “sooky” as “emotional.” Imagine that.

As is often the case when I’m near a computer and encounter a word I’ve never seen before, I went to Google. The most relevant result of my search for “sooky” was a young blogger’s complaint that when her boy friend leaves her in order to go off to work, that is how she feels.

Clearly, I have now learned, it is not good to feel sooky, and I know from other settings that being “pissed” here means being intoxicated, not angry. Similarly, “arvo” no longer baffles me. I know that means “afternoon,” the time of day between lunchtime and dinner. Well, actually it’s the time between dinner and supper if you speak West Texan. Or between lunch and “tea” if you…

Jeepers! It’s a wonder we can communicate at all. I don’t want to big note myself by claiming to be a beaut bloke, but all this complexity could cause a man to lose his Mallee and begin to feel sooky.

No telling how many errors I made in that last paragraph. I’m out of my depth now.

But who cares? I’ll never become fluent in “dinky di Strine,” but I agree with Veitch when she says, “I like the way Australians speak. The world is homogenising fast enough already.”

True. And my new bi-pass secateur is safely stored right next to my crescent wrenches. — Bob