Re: OT: Slang, curses and vulgarities

Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon) wrote:

>> (The Transport Accident Commission has a slogan
>> reminding us that if you drink then drive, you're a bloody idiot.
>
> Still? That slogan was current over a decade ago here, but not now.
Hm, perhaps it's not. No---at the moment, they're having a campaign
with the slogan 'Only a little bit over? You bloody idiot.' (with some
damn good ads, if I say so myself). The association between 'bloody
idiot' and drink-driving is still current, though, and I can't ever see
it dying, and the earlier phrase is the prototypical one.

And he also wrote:

> Thomas R. Wier wrote:
(PS: Sorry for misspelling your name a while ago.)

>> What's a chook?
>
> Australian English for hen/chicken.
>
> It's still a chicken when you eat it, though.
I tend to have chook for the animal, whole, and chicken for the animal
as food. Things like 'a chicken' is as ungrammatical to my ear as 'a
beef'. If you're having chicken for dinner, you might be having a whole
bird, or you might be having chicken wings. If you're having a chook
for dinner, you're eating the whole bird (well, minus the head,
feathers, guts). Presumably roasted. Some people might say they're
having chook for dinner (note no article), but this seems derogatory to
me, if you could speak offensively of chooks.

So you'd stuff a chook, but you can't really stuff chicken, and I can't
stuff a chicken, because it's not grammatical. I knew the word was
perculiar to Australian (at least as a standard word), but I thought
it's meaning was commonly known elsewhere.

> A common derivative is "chook bucket", meaning a food bin for meal
> scraps that are to be fed to the chooks.
Oh, that's common? We used to have chooks, and so we've always called
it the chook bucket, and no-one's seemed to mind, but I wasn't sure if
calling it a chook bucket even when we didn't have any chooks around is
normal.

--
Tristan.