Transcript of AE 1309 - 28+ Aussie Slang Words Foreigners DON'T UNDERSTAND!

Everyone else is a bogan. I'm not a bogan. It's so interesting how many different ones we have. And then we have some colourful ones, like budgie smugglers. Muz, I have never heard in my life. Drongo. I think this is a bird? Apparently someone told him. No one's going to know what a prawn is. Say shrimp instead. Plastered. Pierced. Wrecked. Wasted. Sloshed. I would never say that.

G'day, you mob! Pete here from Aussie English. Welcome to this episode. Today we are going to be reacting to a video from the YouTube channel Welcome To. And this video is 28 Aussie Slang Words and Phrases That You Need to Know.

So it's probably not aimed at someone like myself, but there are quite a few differences regionally in the slang terms and expressions we use Down Under, in Australia. So I thought this might be a fun episode or video to react to, to see what phrases they've chosen, and then to tell you whether or not I would actually use them as a fair dinkum, true blue Australian from Melbourne, Victoria. So don't tell anyone, okay?

Can you give me any words or phrases that are typically Australian? Bogan. Okay. And you have to explain it because people are watching this that don't know. Um, so a bogan is like a person who, well, I don't know. Basically around here you can probably see a lot of bogans. They do tend to hang around Cavill Avenue. They're kind of someone who drinks a lot of beer. Uh, doesn't really care about what they look like, um, what they do with their life. There are lots of nice bogans, though. And then there are lots of really mean bogans.

One of the funnest things you can do as an Australian, or as a non-australian, is ask an Australian to define what a bogan is, and see what they say. How do they describe it? So one of the funny things there was she's like, Oh, they drink lots of beer. Uh, there's lots of bogans who don't. Let's ask ChatGPT. Okay, what is a bogan, and see what it says. You know, this is the definitive guide to what a bogan is, okay? Jesus Christ, they, it gives you the most verbose answers. Let's shorten that.

A bogan in Aussie slang describes someone with rough working class style, often loving Australian things like footy, utes, and beer! Man, she knocked it out of the park, I guess. It can be affectionate or critical and is now a cultural icon, embracing laid back, down to earth vibes.

So it's 100% true. Bogans are seen as these sort of like uncouth, straight talking, working class people. They typically don't behave in a very well to do kind of manner. We've all got a bit of bogan in us. I think as Australians you can turn it on and off, right? I can turn it on when I'm around, you know, my mates. But when I'm with my grandparents who are in their 90s, I try and turn it off. They're very well to do so I try and behave myself.

But yeah, bogans. And it's one of these funny things. I think for a long time bogans were everyone knew who was a bogan, what a bogan was. But you were never a bogan. It was like everyone else was a bogan. I'm not a bogan, but these people are. And they'd be like, No, I'm not, but that person is. So it was, it was always one of these funny terms that we'd all use on people we knew. But you'd rarely come across self-accepting bogans. Yeah, I'm totally a bogan. Until more recently. Until more recently. In fact, I think there was a TV show hunting for Australia's biggest bogan and they found him down in Tassie, I believe.

But can you call a bogan a bogan, or is that going to get you in trouble? No, that can get you in a lot of trouble. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, crosses a lot of lines.

I guess you just shouldn't assume. You shouldn't assume that anyone is specifically a self-accepted bogan.

Well, we have an obsession with shortening things, so I suppose, like scarnon, what's going on? Can you say that again? Scarnon. Scarnon. Scarnon. Yeah. What's going on, mate? Scarnon.

Scarnon. Yeah, you can just say this as /scarnon/ /scarnon/. It's almost like you've said the word /sca(r)/ and then /non/ /scarnon/. /scarnon/, mate? And it's just an abbreviation of What is going on. As in, How are you? What are you up to? What are you doing at the moment? S'carnon? What's going on, mate? S'carnon?

What about you? Well, we've also got a word for what people would say sweatpants. We call them tracky dacks. Yeah, tracky dacks. Tracky dacks, that's for sure. Petrol station is servo.

Jeez, they're just smashing them out. Okay. Yeah. So, sweatpants, we would never say sweatpants. In fact, I'm wearing sweatpants right now. Could you believe it? They're tracksuit pants or just trackies, or tracky dacks, trackies. I don't know what else you would call them besides that. I honestly, right at this moment, I can't think of the non slang term that we would use. I don't think we would ever use sweatpants. I guess the idea there being that you would wear them while sweating because you're working out. At least I would never say that.

And then what did they say? Did they say servo? So that's a service station, as in petrol station, gasoline station, gas station. If you're an American, I guess we call them servos. You used to, I guess you used to go there and you would get service from people who may put the gas or the petrol in your car. We don't call it gas, we call it petrol, diesel. Gas itself would be the actual gas that you would put in the car, right. Is it LPG? That's the gas.

Liquorland is bottle-o. Bottle-o. Bottle-o.

Liquor land isn't, Liquorland is a company that has bottle-o's. A bottle-o is any store that sells alcoholic beverages. They have a license to do so. You can have drive through bottle-o's in Australia, where you can literally drive in, buy your alcohol, put it in the car. Sometimes you can even get people to do it for you, right? You can lean out the window and tell them what you want and they chuck it in your car. It's also self-serve. And we just have like, Dan Murphy's would be the biggest one. I think that's the biggest chain of bottle-o's in Australia. But bottle shops, bottle-o's.

Swimmers? We say cosy, cozzies. Oh, do we? Yeah, I didn't even know that.

Now, this is a really interesting one. So there is actually a map that I have seen. This is a map on screen here of the different slang terms that are used in Australia to talk about your swimsuit, your clothing when you go swimming. There are so many of these different ways of referring to it. And you can see interestingly, it is sort of regions of Australia. So it looks like Queensland is by and large will use togs. And then around Sydney it can be cosy, but it could also be swimmers more broadly in New South Wales and then in Victoria it looks like there is again togs comes back in the northern part of Victoria.

But bathers was the one that I grew up always saying. Bathers. Get your bathers. And it looks like bathers is also used in Perth. All the Western Australia, their central Australia, South Australia and Tasmania as well as Victoria. So it's so interesting how many different ones we have. And then we have some colourful ones like budgie smugglers, which is Speedos for men because your genitalia looks like a small budgie, which is a parrot in Australia, and it's like you're smuggling it, I guess, into the water to maybe to drown him.

So, if you're wanting to tell someone No, you would say Yeah, nah. Or if you're wanting to say Yes, you'd say Nah, yeah.

It's not as easy as that. It's not as easy as saying like, Okay, anytime I want to say No, I'm going to say Yeah, nah. And anytime I want to say Yes, I'm going to say Nah, yeah. And I've noticed that other English speakers from around the world do the same thing, but they will say, Yeah, no, or they'll say No, yes, they'll use the words. It's a weird thing where we're sort of using that initial word yes or no to kind of show agreement with someone.

So if someone tells you some information, you're kind of like, Oh yeah, but then you disagree with what they're saying or you're all the answer is no, right? You would say no. So like, Do you want to have some fish and chips tonight. You're sort of like Oh yeah. No, no I'm good. You know, like Yeah, it's a good idea. But no, I don't feel like it.

And you can do it in the reverse, right, where you could say Nah, yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea actually. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's almost you change your mind mid-sentence, but it's also kind of accepting what they've said, giving them an up or down with yes or no at the start. Effectively the cheat code is whatever the last word was, is your answer. If they end with yeah, it's yes. If they end with nah, it's no. Okay.

So it's a weird linguistic phenomenon. It'd be really interesting to know if this happens in other languages too. In Japanese, do they have this same phenomenon of using the equivalent words of yes and no the same way?

Yeah, no means No. No, yeah means Yes. No. Yeah. Wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the servo is the service station. There's a U-ey for a u-turn.

U-ey, u-turn. Do a u-turn. Turn your car around 180 degrees, right. Drive back. Go turn around and drive back. That is to do a u-turn. And we shorten that to just do a U-ey. To do a u-ey. Ah, chuck a u-ey. You can say that as well. Do u-ey, chuck a u-ey.

Ah, the bottle-o, it's the bottle shop. Instead of saying afternoon, you say Arvo. That's what you do in Australia.

Arvo. Afternoon. What are you doing this arvo? A cool thing to mention here is that with this morning, this afternoon and this evening, you'll notice when Australians say them, this no longer sounds like this in the phrase. It'll sound like the or the and the s sound at the end of the word. This goes to the next word. So you'll hear /the s'morning/, /the s'afternoon/, or /thi s'arvo/, /the s'evening/.

I don't know if other dialects of English, like the Brits, do this, or the Americans do this. Like you'll have to tell me. Do you pronounce it that way? Would you say, like, what are you doing this morning? This morning? Would you say the same thing in America? Or, what are you doing this evening? The evening? Would you say it like that in, in Britain? God, nailing the accents, man.

You say Christmas, we say Chrissie. You say present, we say prezzie. So, Christmas present would be chrissie prezzie.

Man, chick's on fire! Dude, she's nailing it. We have a lot of these diminutives or shortening of words, and we typically end them with an O sound, an E sound, or an R sound. So things like Christmas, Chrissie. Present, prezzie, biscuit bicky. Biker, like someone who rides a motorbike, bikie. There's loads of them. There's literally hundreds of them. O ones, I'm trying to think of like, yeah, servo, arvo, we've got those ones.

And then R, things like sandwich becoming sanger. There's fewer of these. I can't think of any others. Again, leave them in the comments, guys. Can you think of any others? But we do that. That tends to be the pattern. It's going to be E, O or R.

First up, Macca's. Good old classic. That's McDonald's. When I first came here, I didn't know what an ambo was. It's an ambulance.

Macca's, McDonald's. We're going to Macca's. We also have the phrase to do a Macca's run, and that is to go, I guess to Macca's. Probably just to go through the drive through. Though you might get out and go and buy some McDonald's and then come home, but that's to do a maccas run, you know. Oh, we're going to go do a maccas run after footy. We're going to go to Macca's and we're going to get some food. We're going to do a maccas run.

And then what did she say? Ambo. Yeah, that's another one with O, you know, ambo. It's a funny one. It can be the ambulance itself, but it can also be the people driving the ambulance. The paramedics, they're the ambos. So we need an ambo because someone's hurt. Quick, call the ambos. As in the paramedics. I don't know if you would use the singular for a single paramedic, though. He's an ambo. I don't know if you would say that. I don't know, it's sort of weird. I think I always use it in plural. The ambos.

Mussed, which is like my favourite word, and it just means messed up.

Mussed. I have never heard in my life. Mussed. I guess. Yeah, mucked up. Mussed. Never heard that. I've never heard that.

Cheeky barbie. That's like a barbecue. Having a bevvy, like a beverage.

All right, so what did she do there, bevvy? Beverage. Usually an alcoholic drink. I think you would say you want to get a bevvy after work. Do you want to have something to drink? Some alcoholic drink after work? Barbie, barbecue, right. And that can be interestingly, it can be the device that you're cooking the food on. You know, you've got a barbie, you've got some snags on the barbie, some sausages. You've got some patties, some hamburgers.

But barbie could also be the event. It could be the party that you're holding. You're having a barbie, right? I'm going to have a barbie. I'm going to chuck all the food on the barbie. And what did she mention? Cheeky. We use cheeky, I think, differently from a lot of other countries as well that speak English. We use cheeky to kind of mean like quick, right. So you could say like we're gonna have a cheeky barbie on the weekend. It's almost like this naughty but fast, if that makes sense. Like if, if someone said to you, Oh, I had a cheeky root on the weekend for me, I think I would get the idea that they had, they had sex and it was, it was fast and naughty, you know.

Grog. Isn't that like.. That's an old one. That's an old one. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Grog is like, from hundreds of years ago for alcoholic drinks that, I think this was what was drunk on ships. In fact, again asked ChatGPT. What's grog?

In Australian slang, grog refers to alcoholic drinks, especially beer. It's a casual term, and Aussies might say they haven't a few grogs when they're drinking alcohol with friends. Yeah, but what's the origin of the word? I think it is a sailing term, right? There you go. Boom! Nailed it. The term grog originated with the British Royal Navy in the 18th century. It referred to a mix of water and rum given to sailors to prevent them from drinking too much straight rum, so obviously so they could still do their job, and I guess they would have had rum in the water to make sure that there was no bacteria or other nasties growing in it. I think that's why. Yeah, back in the day, everyone used to be plastered all the time to avoid getting dysentery and other diseases that would be carried in the water.

Smoko, isn't that like a break? Yeah, like. Yeah. Breaks. Smoko is originally a short break where you would have a cigarette, but we can use it more frequently now for just a short break even if you're not smoking, right. You might be like, I'm just gonna have a smoko. And the idea is you're going to have a break, you know, you're gonna have a cheeky break, a quick one.

Drongo is an old slang term for idiot.

Drongo. I think this is a bird?! Is drongo originally from a bird? Oh, wow. Okay. Drongo is Aussie slang for idiot or fool. And it has an interesting origin. It comes, it came from the name of a racehorse in the 1920s called Drongo. Despite competing in numerous races, Drongo never won and people began using his name to describe someone who consistently fails or does something foolish. Over time, it stuck as a general term for someone considered to be a bit of an idiot or loser. That's so sad. That poor horse. Imagine. Imagine that's your imprint on the Australian slang, or the Australian history, is that they use your name as a racehorse to mean an idiot or fool.

Instead of saying cigarette, it's duzza. I was just thinking that taking a duzza.

I guess that's short for durry? Although it's not, it's still two syllables, I would say ciggy. That's the short term I would use for a cigarette. Durry, I've heard. I've never heard duzza. Duzza. And there's one with /a/ at the end of it. Duzza. I don't know where durry originally comes from. I looked it up and it seems to be. There's a lot of different hypotheses, but it's used for cigarette.

Vb. Victoria Bitter. Or a Boag's Draught.

A Boag's Draught. Yeah. So these are beers. Vb is just the abbreviation of Victoria Bitter, which is a brand of beer. It's probably the most iconic beer that you will see in Australia. And Queenslanders are about to yell at me. (Four X) XXXX doesn't count. No one drinks that!

I think that Aussies do is we are like grammatically incorrect. We never say how are you going? We say how are you doing? Is that like wrong?

It's not grammatically wrong. It's that there's abbreviations happening there. I think it's called a ellipsis where you're dropping words. So instead of saying, how are you going? You're saying how ya going. It's just shortening it for spoken English. You would never write like that unless you were quoting how someone actually spoke.

Wrong is shrimp on the barbie. We don't call them shrimp. We call them prawns. Yeah. Hold up. And you don't cook them on a Barbie. You boil them.

That's a vocab thing, though. That's not even a slang thing. Yeah. Shrimp and prawn. We would call them prawn. Prawns are big things. Shrimps are like tiddlers and we don't typically eat those, right. They're little, tiny little things. Even then, yeah. You would get the really small ones from like Thai restaurants or whatever. And they're still prawns. Shrimp, I don't know. I think of the animal. I think of the animal more living in the environment, you know, like someone might have a fish tank with a few shrimps in them. Those little guys that like, eat all the food, the crustaceans. I would never call them prawns, though. I'd also never eat them.

Something I learnt coming to the Gold Coast was that everyone ends their sentences with 'but'. So you like, you know, instead of saying though, you say 'but'. So you like, It's good, but. Or.. But then you don't follow it with anything. You don't follow it with anything else. Yeah. It's just 'but'.

That was such a weird thing. When I was growing up as a Victorian, and I think I went on a trip to Queensland and started hearing that there's two variants. There's 'but' at the end of a phrase or 'eh' or 'hey', at the end of a phrase.

With 'hey', you would think it's almost like a question. It's a tag question. Someone's added to the end of a sentence. You could use it that way, like It's a great day, hey. And they're asking you, you know, Do you think it's a great day? But then it became this kind of like just inflection or habit that people would just add those words to the ends of phrases. A good day, ey? Go to the shops, but. And it's like, but what? But what? But but you're not going to be back later. But you don't have any money, but you don't have a car. But what?

And it's funny, one of my best friends who I grew up with in Ocean Grove down here on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, he moved to Sydney and now he says, 'but' all the time. I'm just like, can you just stop doing that, man? You're just you're a bit of a bogan.

No problems, no worries. Apparently that's very Australian. I have an American friend. No worries is not said anywhere else.

No worries is very common here. You'll also hear things like no wukkas, no dramas, no stress, too easy. No wukkas is a really funny one. That comes from. So, what do we have? We had 'no fucking worries'. 'No wucking furries'. So we reverse the first consonant at the start of each of those words in order to make it less rude. So you're not swearing. You're not saying fucking. You're saying wucking right. No wucking furries. And then it just got shortened even further to 'no wukkas'.

The first time I heard this would have been mid 2000, when I was at university, and one of my friends there was starting to say no wukkas all the time. I can explicitly remember hearing that and just being like, the hell are you talking about? And then it caught on. Now everyone says it. It's crazy. That's how language evolves, I guess.

No wuzzas, no worries. I mean, we shorten names to everything because we can't just say the whole thing. Like Bazza, Shazza, like Barry and Sharon. Yeah. My name is Lauren, in case you were wondering. So Lauren Lozza, chucking the 'za' on everything.

Well, there's a lot of those. So I think, yeah. Who else did I have at university? I think it was Karen, and she was nicknamed Kaz. I've known Shazzas, I've known Lozzas, I've known. And you can you can say Lozza, or you can just say Loz. Shazza or Shaz. Dazza or Daz. It's really common.

So I'm just going home to chuck a shrimp on the barbie. Actually, now that you ask?

You know where that came from? It was fucking Paul Hogan doing an ad in the 80s. After the success of the movie Crocodile Dundee, Australia paid him to do an ad for tourism in Australia. And he had to change, I think he was saying, you know, Chuck another, I'll chuck another prawn on the barbie for you.

Come and say g'day. I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you.

So like, come on over, the barbecues set up and I'm going to put another prawn on it for you to eat. So he was using slang like barbie obviously, that Americans would have been like, are you talking about the doll? But apparently someone told him, no one's going to know what a prawn is. Say shrimp instead. And it's like the dude's holding it in the ad. They'll see it. He's talking about a barbie. They don't use barbie for barbecue, but they're going to get that but not understand what a prawn is?

But that's where it originates from. And it's become this stereotype. We all know about it, and we all act as if every American we're ever going to meet is going to say, Chuck another shrimp on the barbie. Like, was it Dumb and Dumber where he does that? You know, Jim Carrey rolls the window down and there's a woman there and she's from Austria and he's like, Austria. Well, then, g'day, mate. Let's put another shrimp on the barbie. And it was obviously poking fun at that ad that Americans must have been blasted with for a few years after Crocodile Dundee. Anyway, a bit of history for you. Yeah, but we don't actually do that.

That's, don't we? I've never heard anyone say.. A big shrimp. Yeah.

I've never had prawns barbecued before. You'll have to tell me if you're Australian and you do that. I mean, I buy them, but typically I would boil them, I'd fry them, I would do something else with them. I wouldn't throw them on a barbecue because one, they're expensive. And two, they're hard to cook! Like, you cook them fast. And so I feel like a barbecue, you're going to mess them up. But maybe that's just me and my circle. I don't know, you tell me.

Get on the piss or get on the alcohol. So, get smashed. Basically get drunk.

Get smashed is one we use for getting drunk.

I think that would be common worldwide. I guess you guys would use that. What else would we say for drunk? Plastered? Pissed? Wrecked? Wasted? Sloshed? I think a lot of these are ubiquitous, though. Pissed is probably just us. The rest are probably used everywhere.

Drunk. And then after, the bottle-o, you know. Go to the bottle-o and get your piss and get drunk. Drive home, get smashed. Don't do that, but. Even though you explained it, I think half the people aren't going to understand it. Yeah, fair enough. Can you do it slower? Oh yeah, so get on the piss. Like get on the alcohol.

He sounds like a New Zealander to me. He's saying instead of, like, /get/ it sounds like you're saying /git/.

Get smashed. Get drunk. Yeah, that's really what it is.

So if you want to know what a New Zealand accent sounds like when they've been in Australia for a while, because it's not very strong, but it sounds like I think when he said smashed, he said smashed a bit more like that. Let's have a listen again.

Get on the alcohol. Get smashed. Get drunk.

Yeah. Smashed. Um. All right, I guess that's it, guys. Hopefully you enjoy this one again. Let me know if you thought of any that you don't use that you do use any that I missed or that, um, you know, came up in the video. Youtube reckons you're going to enjoy this video next. I hope you do. And I'll see you next time. Tooroo!