Comments by "John D" (@johnd8892) on "American Reacts to 100 Aussie Slang WORDS Australia says Different than America" video.

  1. Bob's your uncle comes from Bob Menzies. Prime Minister of Australia from 1949 to 1965. If he was your uncle you could expect to be favoured.
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  2. Togs for swimwear was a widespread description in my youth here in Victoria. Heard the use from Queensland just recently wrt Australian swim team.
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  3. A rattler here is not the unknown rattlesnake but an older passenger train,. Used since the mid sixties in Victoria as Red Rattler train , later picked up in Sydney.
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  4. Search YouTube for Housing Commission Flats Definately not just low level housing as claimed in some comments. Apartments to distance from Commision Towers. Comments on these flats an eye opener.
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  5. Utes originally car based light trucks and recorded separately in government statistics and registration charges since the thirties. Now getting applied to any light trucks since the car based ones went out of production. Earlier lots of others not Holdens or Falcons. The high performance ute just cropped up largely in the last thirty years since most were work horses.
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  6. Gas in Australia for cars is Liquid Petroleum Gas or LPG. Got widely used for taxis and vehicles of high petrol consumption by converting to LPG. LPG having much less tax on it since a refining by product and also more abundant in our off shore oil wells. So popular that Ford made dedicated E has Falcons in the Barra era. Rapidly going out of use since newer cars not amenable to conversion and taxis going hybrid.
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  7. Flats have no fixed definition and usage varies with time and state. Flats used widely much earlier in Australia. Search YouTube for Beautiful Bondi 1926 Around 14 minutes in the caption says A new building of ultra modern flats - Berkley Court - fronting the beach. Still standing but may be marketed as apartments. The term apartment just to distance new flats from public housing flats and their problems. Search housing Commission Flats and you will get lots of references to well over three storey buildings. Especially in Victoria.
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  8. Queenslanders confuse everyone else talking about packing their Port. Meaning suitcase from the archaic term Portmanteau. Ah Queensland, set your clocks back one hour and sixty years.
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  9. In Victoria and Tasmania we call a lobster a crayfish. Fresh water crayfish are yabbies.
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  10. Some of these vary depending which state you are in. Cantaloupe much more widely used than Rock Melon in Victoria for instance.
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  11. White Maggot refers to Australian Rules umpires from when they dressed in a white shirt and shorts uniform. Used by Rstbag footy supporters. In the early sixties Barry Humphries had a monologue on what a Rstbag is.
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  12.  @aussieguy3689  a search of YouTube for housing Commission Flats will show the high rise flats.
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  13. Slab of beer started off in NSW. Got taken up in Victoria by the eighties or so. So another term that varied by state and time period.
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  14.  @piglos  I am older and remember when the much bigger than six pack wrapped in plastic was introduced from NSW using their term slab.
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  15. A bumper bar gets called a Fender here sometimes, especially years ago. What you call a Fender we call a mudguard.
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  16.  @fknows1  I would love to see that in any dated reference. I searched Trove for it but saw nothing in trove coverage up to the sixties. Definitely used in Sydney press by the late eighties to describe the withdrawal of 1920s style suburban trains as Red Rattlers but nothing I have seen published in an earlier era.
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  17. He spent his early time in Victoria where we do say bathers and togs and more rarely swimmers or costume. I expect you are reflecting NSW usage. So many terms vary from state to state.
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  18.  @aussieguy3689  So bathers is a Victorian term where this Tristan posting learnt the term from. Both bathers and togs in use in Victoria.
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  19. Lots of British Cockney rhyming slang got transferred to Australia and is understood and sometimes used here. But some developed here on the Same principles. Eg Trouble and Strife is wife. Rubbity dub is pub. Often just rubbidy. Unusual that instead of shortening a word they are lengthened to phrases rhyming with the word but sometimes shortened to one word of the phrase to be more obscure and helping to be used as a code for those in the know.
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  20. Dibber Dobber is more a kids term. Criminal circles would say dog.
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  21. If you get called a flog , it is an insulting reference to what nearly all guys have done when alone and feeling frisky.
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  22. Togs was a widespread description in my youth here in Victoria. Heard the use from Queensland just recently wrt Australian swim team.
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  23. Plonk was a widespread description of wine in the past. Usually cheap sly grog with dangerous additives to cheaply make it stronger, but the notoriety spread to all wine for many years. Made wine looked down upon for winos. Sly grog meaning unlicensed alcohol usually sold out of restricted bar hours to the then numerous alcoholics. A bit moonshine like but more wine based. Started in the twenties even without any prohibition era here.
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  24. Lemonade ad from the seventies. https://youtu.be/Tngmz2TfY1A
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  25. South Australia the state has a few unique terms unknown outside the state. Sproggy meaning sparrow. Stobie pole meaning their local utility pole made of concrete to be termite proof. Probly invented by Mr Stobie.
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  26. Chunder is to vomit. See Barry McKenzie Watch Chunder.
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  27. If you look at Australian market car brochures from the fifties most makers , like Ford and Holden , will describe their utes as Coupe Utilities. Same term when they were first invented here as a modification to car bodies in the thirties boom in utility sales. There are YouTube videos of surviving Chevrolet and Ford utilities from the forties. Well before the El Camino and Ranchero. Even really obscure English makes like Armstrong Siddley and Triumph Mayflower had ute versions made for the Australian market.
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  28. Melbourne has lots of Trams clogging up the roads but in the US they would be called streetcars like in San Francisco and New Orleans.
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  29. Sounds like real estate agents trying to distance what they are selling from Housing Commission Flats. At least here in Victoria as a YouTube search will show numerous example of multi storey residences.
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  30. Flats used widely much earlier in Australia. Search YouTube for Beautiful Bondi 1926 Around 14 minutes in the caption says A new building of ultra modern flats - Berkley Court - fronting the beach. Yes the term apartment just to distance new flats from public housing flats.
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  31.  @aussieguy3689  yes you are zoologically correct, but a big part of the public without your knowledge would just say they caught a really big yabbie.
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  32. Video of high rise flats in the news in 1988 in Melbourne https://youtu.be/ZBN8_hylLW4 Also reflects why the term apartment is used to have people forget these aspects of flats.
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  33. Flats used widely much earlier in Australia. Search YouTube for Beautiful Bondi 1926 Around 14 minutes in the caption says A new building of ultra modern flats - Berkley Court - fronting the beach. Yes the term apartment just to distance new flats from public housing flats and their problems.
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  34. A theory a while back was that Australian talk evolved to not open your mouth too widely in case flies got in. Theory was why some pronunciation and slang is more widespread in rural areas but caught on here.
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  35. Air con also just called Air.
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  36. Goon less used than goonbag.
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  37. We don't put a R in Mazda also.
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  38. For many years, a hundred or so, multiple storey housing were just flats in Australia. Often government provided for those in need. US often called the Projects. In the last twenty years or so the word apartment was increasingly used to distance multi storey housing from welfare housing connotations.
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  39. Possibly too much detail on Australian major supermarkets Coles and Woolworths https://youtu.be/tCjcjAAkYOM In Victoria Safeway supermarkets got taken over and renamed Woolworths like the rest of the country. Annoyed most customers.
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  40. Part of McDonald's trying to Americanise us. Successful too when we don't object.
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  41.  @mikeyhau  fries is probably correct for the McDonald's ones with hardly any potato content as opposed to the fish and chip shop thicker ones eaten in Australia for well over a hundred years. Would you like fries with that,?
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