Sorry, cobber, strewth doesn’t cut the mustard any more. Ditto for servo and drongo, tucker and dinkum. Opening your prezzies at Chrissie. Every word is old slang. Digger-speak. The stuff of nashos, grommets and the six o’clock swill.
Australia has evolved, colloquially. If you missed the news, our utes have been usurped by the Shanghai-Lux or Mongolian Lambo, the Genghis Kart and the Won Ton Rodeo. And that’s just a sample of the nicknames for the Chinese pick-ups monstering our highways. Xenophobic? To a degree, since slang is parochial by definition. Racist? At its worst. Though at its finest, our homegrown dialect is ingenious. Hilarious. Who can resist a rat’s coffin as code for sausage roll? Lung lolly for a ciggie? Bogan missile for Jetstar? Wanker’s waistcoat for a sleeveless puffer, otherwise known as a Toorak life jacket?
This last bunch hails from the Deniliquin Dictionary, an Instagram account with a knack for creative vernacular. Click aboard to learn the pokie’s new synonyms, from pineapple juicer (eating your $50 notes) to lobster trap (your $20), from plumber’s piano to brickie’s laptop. Not to be confused with a bachelor’s handbag: a supermarket chook.
Lyndon Christie is the Lexicon Luther behind the mischief, a country-born copywriter who channels an avatar called Keith whenever uploading idiom. “Keith is a 55-year-old twice-divorced tow-truck driver who punches a pack of darts and 600ml iced coffee every morning. He’s a bitter old-timer, a king of his local bistro, and the bloke I have in my head when I define things. He’s Dame Edna if Edna was a grumpy truckie who still reads the form guide.”
The dictionary, or Deni D, began as a COVID project, with Lyndon noticing the chasm between the Zoom-speak of corporate meetings and the irreverence of his own home patch. Gaslighting, say, may be psychological manipulation among city types, compared to the rural brilliance of “Don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining.”
In local hands an ineffectual type “couldn’t run through the streamers at a fish-and-chip shop”. Just as the auto-wreckers and hair salon are grandma’s carpark and gossip factory, respectively. There’s admirable cheek in Australian slang, and a willingness to adapt, as Lyndon discovered when he arrived on Instagram.
“I can sit on an idea for a whole day, but often some smart arse turns up in the comments and bests me.” Real gems, too, like the new term for nervous: “sweating like a Millennial with a mortgage”. Or hungover: “feeling rougher than a builder’s estimate” – maybe from too much sugarcane champagne, aka Bundy and Coke.
Over the trip, some posts have split his 120,000 followers, “People are parochial about their favourite beers. Seems we can’t decide whether drinking craft beer makes you a legend who supports small breweries, or a big wuss.” He’s also learnt real estate agents (alias doorknobs) and personal trainers (adult babysitters) have thin skins, though everyone agrees that “politicians are paid too much to do very little, and we don’t trust them further than we can throw them”.
Evidence was the recent Deniliquin mauling of Pauline Hanson’s flights on a certain mining magnate’s aircraft, otherwise known as VirGina Australia, or a Please Explane. Honestly, you can’t make that stuff up. Well, Aussie slang can.
David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
