Aussie Slang

I started this one a while ago and never finished, so I'm just gonna fill it in and stick it up here.

The single greatest culture difference here in Australia is definitely the slang. Australians have so much slang, and it's usually slang that isn't found anywhere else in the world. Combined with their accents, it's led to me giving a lot of blank looks.

There's slang for different types of people: guys are blokes, girls are sheilas, white trash are bogans, Brits are poms, outlaws are bushrangers, Americans are yanks, someone from New Zealand is a kiwi, and so on.

Then there's the near-inexplicable ones: afternoon becomes arvo, house flies are blowies, a teapot is a billy, an outhouse is a dunny, whining or complaining is whinging or "having a whinge", raisins are sultanas... I just don't know how they came up with this stuff.

The biggest and most ridiculous trend in Australian slang, though, is shortening words and adding a long E sound to the end. At first it seems okay: there's barbie (barbeque), brekkie (breakfast), esky (a cooler), lollies (any variety of candy or other sweet), and sunnies (sunglasses). Then you realize that "Aussie" and "Tassie" both work as adjectives describing something Australian or Tasmanian respectively, but when used as nouns, Aussie means an Australian person, while Tassie is the country of Tasmania. And they really take the whole trend way too far. The final straw was stores advertising Chrissy ornaments for sale. Once that one sunk in, I decided Australians are totally absurd.