Mack daddies, ninjas, and schlubs

Nice set.

No ninjas in English until 1964? How did people live?

Paki seems to have emerged in Australia without the negative connotations of the British term, somehow.

picture phone, n. One of the many futuristic inventions demonstrated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. We still don’t have them

When folks are video calling each other on smartphones, and us older folks are videoskyping for business purposes, in what sense do we not have picturephones? They don’t look like they did in the old movies but they are doing the same thing.

Am I right that monokini would be Japanese for thing in two?

ethnonym, n. This one is a borrowing from the Russian etnomim.

Typo: The Russian should be etnonim (n, not m; it’s этноним).

Stasi, n. The East German secret police, the Staatssicherheitsdienst, had formed in 1950, but it took until 1964 for the organization’s nickname, the Stasi, to make its way into English. The first appearance is in English-language espionage fiction.

I’ve antedated it by a couple of years, to Beyond the Berlin Wall: By Refugees Who Have Fled to the West As Told to Erika Von Hornstein (Wolff, 1962), e.g., “The Stasi got nothing out of him” (p. 56).

yakuza, n. American media took note of the Japanese term for gangster in 1964.

Similar antedate, to The Copper Butterfly, by Henry Gibbs (Walker, 1962), from p. 70: “‘“He was a victim of yakuza assailants” — what on earth are yakuza assailants?’ ‘Gangsters’.”

I love Strine as a word. It epitomizes the ugliness of an Aussie accent. It took me a long time before I figured out/ learnt that Affabeck Lauder was the author’s way of getting an Australian pronunciation of Alphabetical Order. The best way to get an Aussie accent is to not move your top lip and send all the sound up through your nose. And talk quickly with it. You’ll turn Alphabetical Order into Affabeck Lauder quite easily.

Emma Chisit?

Thanks for the correction and antedates.

cafe Americano, n. Often used depreciatively

Or deprecatingly? Depreciatively hsa financial connotations to me, but that may just be me… MW doesn’t really resolve the distinction.

I love Strine as a word. It epitomizes the ugliness of an Aussie accent.

Why “ugliness”?  I hate this kind of rote attack on the way other people speak.

Note that Brad B is an Australian.

frma: corrected

Dave’s birth year!

Why “ugliness”?  I hate this kind of rote attack on the way other people speak.

Well said, lh. Me too.

Note that Brad B is an Australian.

Ah, if that’s the case it isn’t a matter of how other people speak, but I still don’t like that kind of approach to language.  Thanks for the clarification, though.

It’s interesting, though. Could be a topic for another thread.

I like to consider the way other people speak as a learning experience, and a challenge. Sometimes it can be a formidable one. Last month, I was on a teaching job in Thailand for two weeks. Thais (similarly to Israelis) speak a language that nobody else speaks, so for communication with the rest of the world, they must perforce learn at least one other language: as a rule, English. They tend to have good comprehension, but don’t get much practice at talking to English speakers, and their enunciation (though picturesque) was not always easy to follow; despite TV, movies, etc.

One of the toughest communication challenges I ever faced was at Liverpool University many years ago: Steve, a fellow-student from Tyneside. We were friends for about about a year, before I began to have a glimmering of what he was talking about ;-)
After Steve, Strine and such are child’s play.......

Some introspective, personal comments on Australian English and the stigma of a broad Australian accent:

Whereas US English has significant regional differences from state to state, Australian English runs in basically a cline from Broad Australian through General Australia to what is sometimes called cultivated or educated Australian. People in the state capitals tend to be towards the general or cultivated end of the scale, and in each state as you get into the more rural/remote areas, it gets broader. (Urban South Australians are something of an exception, as their dialect has some things in common with cockney).

Some of you would probably have difficulty understanding a very broad Australian accent. I remember when I was backpacking in the UK I met up with a fellow from Longreach (which really is in the middle of nowhere), and a lot of the time I had to translate his English into a more internationally recognised form of English for the other people we encountered. Although general Australian is certainly very different from RP, you could certainly say a broad Australian accent is further from RP than a general Australian accent. The vowels are strongly shifted, it tends to be nasal, and there are some subtle consonantal differences as well.

I grew up in a small city in tropical North Queensland and moved to the state capital as an adult. Even before I moved, though, while I was in high school, my accent became less broad as I hung around people who aimed to be better: maybe it was an affectation. Certainly after I moved to the capital I drifted towards general Australian, but when I went back up north to visit my family I could switch back.

It’s clear from the old newsreels and TV broadcasts that up until the 1960s, news presenters used rather British accents. The people they interviewed in the street spoke with various Australian accents, but it seemed you couldn’t get a news gig unless you could sound like Richard Burton. Even today, you will never hear an Australian newsreader using a broad Australian accent. It is still associated, mentally, with a lack of sophistication, poor education, ignorance and backwards ideas.

So what’s going on? Are we embarrassed? A bit. The Brits (Poms, as we call them) never miss an opportunity to remind us that Australia was born in shame, a colony built by their worst offenders, and later filled by the rejecta of proper countries. There are big chips on our national shoulders. Australia has had some decent achievements in recent years and you’d think we’d be past all the cultural cringe, but there is a certainly a view in Australia that a strong Australian accent sounds ugly. Our current Prime Minister was, like Burton, born in Wales but was in Australia since she was a toddler and has somehow acquired an accent broad enough to make Crocodile Dundee sound like Sir John Gielgud. A lot of Australians will tell you it is hard to put up with, that is just sounds rotten or jarring, and even though I try to be rational about these things, if pressed I’d have to agree. If I had to listen to a national leader read a particular long piece, I’d probably prefer Obama or Cameron rather than Gillard. It’s a terrible thing to say because she sounds like my parents did when they were alive, she sounds like I used to sound, but a strong Australian accent just doesn’t sound _formal_ enough for a PM.