I agree with Adam (but probably go further...)
This might be more a topic for ADS-L but I am not willing to accept most of the ones in this article as Australian in origin -
either the ones that are wildly common in everyday British English and seem likely to have been so for a long time,
or those that I grew up with as American slang (eg "crash") and have never remotely associated with Oz. How they
would have disseminated so widely by the early 1970s at latest, in an era with no Aussie TV etc in the US, etc, is beyond me...
I suspect there is a strong ideological component in this claiming of origins, which runs something like this:
The English are by definition all posh compared to Australians
Thus British English vernacular cannot be authentic
Anything vernacular found in Australia must therefore be Australian in origin
The focus mainly seems to be on reclaiming from the Brits, as nearly all the items said to "have made their way into global English"
are noticeably absent from US usage and sound very non-American (though I can't say about Canada which of course has many
more Briticisms) to me. There may be a similar ideology aimed at US usage but it doesn't surface much here.
Of course the article fudges tremendously by first saying "phrases derived from or chiefly used in Australian English ", and then going
on to claim as "Australian" any items which are simply in common use down under. Since the OED entries make no reference to frequency
to begin with, there is not even an argument that they are in MORE common use in OZ than the UK, much less that they originate from Oz.
Pretty poor from the Beeb. Will the election coverage later this week be equally unreliable?...
-p-
-----Original Message-----
From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Adam Schembri
Sent: 06 May 2015 12:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Court says Skype's name is too similar to Sky's
Well, while we’re on the topic of the BBC website, Dave, I don’t really buy this:
http://www.test.bbc.com/culture/story/20150427-pervs-greenies-and-ratbags
As an Australian who lived in London for nearly five years, it’s quite clear where we Australians got ‘mate’ and ‘bloody’ from. I don’t buy that some of the others are Australian: ‘selfie’ may have first been recorded in Australia, but I suspect it was created independently in multiple parts of the English speaking world.
Cheers,
Adam
--
Assoc. Prof. Adam Schembri, PhD https://latrobe.academia.edu/AdamSchembri
Department of Languages & Linguistics | School of Humanities and Social Sciences | College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce | La Trobe University | Melbourne (Bundoora) | Victoria | 3086 | Australia |Tel :
+61 3 9479 2887 | Twitter: @AdamCSchembri | Director, Centre for
+Research
on Language Diversity http://www.latrobe.edu.au/crld & Linguistics Discipline Research Program| Sign Language Linguistics Society:
http://www.slls.eu <http://www.slls.eu/> | ALLY Network Member supporting GLBTIQ students and staff: www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally http://www.latrobe.edu.au/equality/ally
New book available ’Sociolinguistics and Deaf communities’: http://
<http://www.cambridge.org/9781107663862>www.cambridge.org/9781107663862
<http://www.cambridge.org/9781107663862>
On 6/05/2015 20:41, "Dave Sayers" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I thought this might tickle VAR-Lers:
>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32593735
>
>Dave
>
>--
>Dr. Dave Sayers
>Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University Honorary
>Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University
>(2009-2015)
>[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>
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