Funny expressions we use......

[Katie77]

"We must have hit a skunk that crawled out the ass of another skunk"

(From "Everybody Loves Raymond". While driving in the car, Ray was upset because Robert's feet smelled bad)

Love it David.....I'm a big fan of Everybody Loves Raymond.....

[Kerry]

Here's a couple from Australia:

* She can talk under cement (think Lashawn) 

* As ugly as a hat full of nuns' cu*ts (definitely not in polite usage) 

* Bumping uglies (having sex) 

* Do I look like someone who gives a f*ck? (used sarcastically, meaning "I'm not interested") 

* Flat-out like a lizard drinking (very busy) 

* Trouser snake (penis)   

* Map of Tasmania (vagina)   

* Point Percy at the porcelain (urinate - male) 

* Technicolour yawn (vomit) 

* Moon tan (pale complexion) 

Kerry

[Kerry]

Here's a couple from Australia:
* Trouser snake (penis)   

Oops! Erratum - that should be "one-eyed trouser snake"!   

And how could I possibly forget one of Australia's most famous colloquialisms - Pom!!! 

Australians refer to English people as Poms or Pommys. This term is always used with humour and affection, never malice (well, maybe sometimes with malice LOL). During the recent cricket tests between Australia and England, advertisements appeared all over Australia, encouraging Aussies to thrash the "Poms" in the cricket (I saw it on the side of a bus this very morning). A group of expat Brits got together and brought a legal action against the advertisers. They claimed the term was derogatory and racist. Needless to say, they failed. It was thrown out. I guess they simply don't understand that it is a great compliment to be given a derogatory nick-name by an Australian. It means he likes you!!! 

All these expressions would be very familiar to our Heath 

Kerry

P.S., We DID thrash the Poms in the cricket and I'm sure Heath would have been delighted about that!!! (LOL) 

[saucycobblers]

We DID thrash the Poms in the cricket and I'm sure Heath would have been delighted about that!!! (LOL) 

Hi Kerry. Yep, us Poms sure deserved the thrashing you lot gave us in the cricket  . We were about as much use as a chocolate teapot on that pitch!

* Technicolour yawn (vomit) 

Related to the above, I wonder if you (or any other Aussies on the board) could clear up something for me. I love Aussie cinema and wrote about it for both of my dissertations, and one of the films I wrote about was 'The Adventures of Barry McKenzie' from 1972, starring Barry Crocker as the titular hero. In the film he says that the Australian expression to 'chunder' (vomit) has its origins in the transportation of convicts, when anyone in an upper bunk would warn those below to 'watch under' if he or she was going to be sick. Do you know if this is true? I've looked on the web, but to no avail.

[Katie77]

In the film he says that the Australian expression to 'chunder' (vomit) has its origins in the transportation of convicts, when anyone in an upper bunk would warn those below to 'watch under' if he or she was going to be sick. Do you know if this is true? I've looked on the web, but to no avail.

I had never heard that before, but it makes perfect sense to me as an Aussie.....

[Front-Ranger]

Hey Sue, some people were looking for you over on your blog.

Happy New Year!!

[Kerry]

Related to the above, I wonder if you (or any other Aussies on the board) could clear up something for me. I love Aussie cinema and wrote about it for both of my dissertations, and one of the films I wrote about was 'The Adventures of Barry McKenzie' from 1972, starring Barry Crocker as the titular hero. In the film he says that the Australian expression to 'chunder' (vomit) has its origins in the transportation of convicts, when anyone in an upper bunk would warn those below to 'watch under' if he or she was going to be sick. Do you know if this is true? I've looked on the web, but to no avail.

I googled for "chunder" and found the following:

AUSSIE WORDS: CHUNDER

by Frederick Ludowyk

CHUNDER: verb, to vomit. noun, 1a. vomit; 1b. an act of vomiting. 2. in various transferred and figurative usages.

What is the origin of this Australian word? The two-volume New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) is quite terse about it: ‘origin unknown’, it says, avoiding speculation. And speculation there is in plenty. One theory (which I find implausible) is that the word is a truncation of ‘Watch under!’, shouted in warning by a person on the upper deck of a ship to those below when he is about to vomit over the rails. ‘Watch under!’ could, when yelled out (so the story goes), come to sound like ‘wa-CHUNDER!’ which in turn could easily have given way to chunder. Writing in 1965 in the Times Literary Supplement, London, 16 Sept., Barry Humphries expounds on the word and its putative origin:

His [the character Barry McKenzie’s] favourite word to describe the act of involuntary regurgitation is the verb to chunder. This word is not in popular currency in Australia, but the writer recalls that ten years ago it was common in Victoria’s more expensive public schools. It is now used by the Surfies, a repellent breed of sunbronzed hedonists who actually hold chundering contests on the famed beaches of the Commonwealth. I understand, by the way, that the word derives from a nautical expression ‘watch under’, an ominous courtesy shouted from the upper decks for the protection of those below.

The trouble is that there is no evidence to hand that ominously courteous people on the upper decks of ships ever cried the cry ‘Watch under!’ One would have thought that ‘Watch out below!’ would have been more natural a formulation for them to have used. But perhaps ‘Watch out below!’ would have taken them too long to cry out before the disgusting disaster occurred. In any case ‘Watch out below!’ spoils a perfectly good story, even if that story, as Pooh Bah expostulated anent something else entirely, ‘give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative’.

In 1964 Barry Humphries wrote in A Nice Night’s Entertainment 77: ‘When I’d swallowed the last prawn/I had a Technicolor yawn/And I chundered in the old Pacific sea.’ If the word chunder was ‘not in popular currency in Australia’ in 1964 or in 1965 when Humphries wrote his article in the Times Literary Supplement, it is common coinage now, and for that Australian English owes him (and his constantly chundering creation, Barry ‘Bazza’ McKenzie) a great deal of gratitude.

Another theory is that chunder is a truncation of ‘Chunder Loo’, which in turn is rhyming slang for ‘spew’. The Australian National Dictionary assigns probability to this theory. ‘Chunder Loo of Akim Foo’, a tall, bald, smiling, endearing Indian from Bengal, always accompanied by a fat koala dressed in the same fashion as Chunder, and usually shown riding a chariot drawn by three harnessed cobras, was the main character in a series of cartoons, accompanied by verses, drawn by Norman Lindsay (later by Lionel Lindsay) to advertise Cobra boot polish. The cartoons were very popular and ran in the Sydney Bulletin from 1909 to 1920. The cartoons were always immediately topical, dealing with the latest incidents in the war, the visit to Australia by the Prince of Wales, crises in cricket, bombshells in boxing, etc. A typical cartoon shows a chortling Chunder Loo presenting a bunch of horrified Huns with stacks of bills for the war just ended. The accompanying jingle reads as follows:

                        Chunder Loo
                        Of Akim Foo,
                        Ushers in the
                        Germans, who
                        Stare in horror
                        At the bills
                        Lying there in
                        Heaps and hills.
                        ‘Gott in Himmel!’
                        Wail the Huns,
                        And a wave of
                        Laughter runs
                        Round the room
                        When Chunder adds,
                        ‘There’s a “COBRA”
                        Job, my lads!’
                        [All the other
                        Sorts he loses!
                        Cobra is THE
                        Stuff for Shoeses!]

This provenance of chunder is certainly more credible than the ‘Watch under!’ one. But it has a salient problem, the hoary old problem of the ‘missing link’. All our earliest citations seem to have no connection with ‘vomit’:

1914: ‘At the sign of the three onions Uncle Chunder the well known financier is prepared to do business’ (Geelong Racer: Paper of Troopship ‘Geelong’, 29 Oct. 2); 1917: ‘They envy the cut o’ me, and all make a butt o’ me/And sing out “Hullo, Chunder-Loo” ’ (Rabaul Record: Newspaper of the Colony of German New Guinea, Occupied by Australian Military Forces, 1 Aug. 5); 1918: ‘My guide (“Chunder”) halted before a low, squalid-looking mud hut’ (Kia-ora Coo-ee: The Official Magazine of the Australian and New Zealand Forces, Cairo, June 15/1).

It is worthy of note that the three citations above come from the Australian armed forces. This gives credence to the suggestion made by H.W. Orsman in his Dictionary of New Zealand English (1997) that chunder may possibly derive from ‘WWl. Chunder a nickname for an Egyptian (? adaptation of Chand(r)a)’. Orsman directs us to the following citation, also from Kia-ora Coo-ee: 1918: ‘So questioned “Chunder” (a walid, who, for a few piastres per week, acted as “batman” to myself and a couple of mates)’ (15 June 15).

Our first citation for chunder in the probable sense ‘vomit’ comes as late as 1950: ‘The way these bloody Nips go on. Makes you chunda’ (Nevil Shute, A Town like Alice, 76). In our next citation (1964: Barry Humphries, A Nice Night’s Entertainment—quoted above) the ‘vomit’ connection is unequivocal. And so it continues to be in all the subsequent citations; for example: 1964 ‘It is based on a comprehensive survey of students in the 17 to 22 age bracket who drink heavily and chunder frequently, and it therefore is a fair cross-sectional survey of the community as a whole’ (Woroni, May 15 2/5).

The sense ‘vomit’ is unequivocal in citations for the noun as well: 1967 ‘One of the boys asked him about the chunder and the Gargler says modestly: “I never chundered in my life; I put it down and keep it down” ’ (Frank Hardy, Billy Borker Yarns Again, 37). Hence we get the adjectives chunderous and chundersome meaning ‘sickening, vomit-inducing’: 1971 ‘Chunderous new telly series. Anglo-Australian film interests are planning their biggest venture yet—Coronation Street Meets Bellbird’ (Kings Cross Whisper, Sydney, cii. 3/2); 1971 ‘The Poms are rapacious, mean, cunning. Bazza is beery, chundersome, anal’ (Bulletin, 4 Dec. 11/2).

We’ve canvassed some possible etymologies for chunder. A further possibility remains: that our word comes from British dialect chunter (which also exists in the forms chunner, chounter, and chunder). It is a verb that the OED says is ‘Apparently of imitative formation’. It means ‘to mutter, murmur; to grumble, find fault, complain’. Among the OED’s citations are the following: 1921 ‘A thin old woman ... was chuntering her head off because it was her seat’ (D.H. Lawrence, Sea & Sardinia iv. 135); 1949 ‘You ... fog-blathering,/Chin-chuntering, liturgical ... base old man!’ (Christopher Fry, The Lady’s not for Burning, 27); 1957 ‘The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises’ (Nevil Shute, On the Beach i. 2). It’s a possible derivation, certainly, but I don’t think it a probable one.

Is it just a coincidence that Nevil Shute in On the Beach provides our earliest clearcut example of chunder meaning ‘vomit’ and this interesting use of British dialect chunter?
 

Talk about over-kill! It's enough to make you chunder! 

LOL

Kerry

[Katie77]

Holy Shit, thats a lot of discussion over one word.......!!

[saucycobblers]

 

I guess I have my answer!!

Thanks Kerry! 

[Front-Ranger]

These Aussies take their special words seriously!! I have an Australian slang dictionary and it's a huge and heavy tome.