A to Zed of Aussie Slang

A to Zed of Aussie Slang
Author: Ian McKenzie
Publisher: Ian McKenzie
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2014-11-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

An updated 2015 glossary of Australian slang. Languages are alive and constantly changing. After the Malaysian airways fight MH17 was shot down in Ukraine in 2014, Australia's Prime Minister threatened to "shirtfront" Russia's President Vladimir Putin at the November G20 meeting of government heads in Brisbane, Australia. Not many people except for ardent Australian Rules Football followers had any idea of what a "shirtfront" is. It is explained along with hundreds of other slang terms in this comprehensive up to date glossary of Australian colloquialisms.

A to Zed of Aussie Slang 2015

A to Zed of Aussie Slang 2015
Author: Ian McKenzie
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2014-11-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781503171060

Australian English like all other languages being used is a living entity and is constantly changing. Many slang terms used by my parent's generation are infrequently used now. Likewise, the language used by Aussie teenagers today is different from the language I feel comfortable using. With the internet, television and the globalisation of almost everything, cultures are being influenced by other cultures and many slang terms are now almost universal. However, we do need to take care when we use language in different cultures, because even the same slang terms can mean different things. Two examples which come to mind are the words "thong" and "fanny". These words have very different meanings in the United States of America and in Australia. In Australia, the context in which various words are used can totally change the meanings of those words. An example is the word "bastard". The dictionary meaning is "a person born from an unmarried mother". It is used in a derogatory sence in most cultures and can be used that way in Australia also. However, in Australia it can also be used in an almost affectionate way between good friends.

Anglotopia's Dictionary of British English

Anglotopia's Dictionary of British English
Author: Jonathan Thomas
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9781482014211

Guide to differences between English as spoken in the USA compared with the UK.

Word Drops

Word Drops
Author: Paul Anthony Jones
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0826356575

From aardvark to zenzizenzizenzic, Word Drops collects a thousand obscure words and language facts in one fascinating chain of word associations. Did you know, for example, that scandal derives from the Latin for “stumbling block” and originally described a trap for a wild animal? In nineteenth-century slang a wolf trap was a corrupt casino. Casino means “little house” in Italian. Roulette means “little wheel” in French. A wheeler is someone who attends auctions to bid on items merely to increase their sale price. Such links take readers on an unexpected journey through linguistic oddities. Inspired by the popular @HaggardHawks Twitter account, Word Drops also uses an intriguing series of annotations to add background and historical context on everything from Anglo-Saxon cures for insanity to Samuel Pepys’s cure for a hangover. This unique book will delight anyone who loves language, etymology, and word games. Not for sale in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, or Canada

Australian Slang

Australian Slang
Author: David Tuffley
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9781477536803

Aussie Slang is a richly-textured, often ribald world of understatement and laconic humour. This guide aims to do three things; (a) to help the traveller decipher what they hear around them in everyday Australian life, (b) give the causal reader some insight into informal Australian culture, and (c) make a record of some old Australian expressions that are slipping into disuse now that English has become a global language. Readers will recognize both British and American terms in this list. Australian English has absorbed much from these two great languages. For depth of knowledge of their own language, no-body beats the British. Its their language after all. A thousand years in the making, the English language is embedded deep in the DNA of the British. No-one uses their language more skilfully than they do. On the other hand, American English has a creative power that recognizes no boundaries. Americans have taken a very good all-purpose language and extended it in all kinds of directions with new words describing the world as it is today. They do not generally cling to old forms out of respect for tradition. As Winston Churchill observed, Britain and America … two great nations divided by the same language. Australian English sits comfortably in the space between the two. Australian English began in the early days of settlement as English English with a healthy dash of Celtic influence from the many Scots, Irish and Welsh settlers who came to Australia. Large numbers of German settlers also came in the 1800's,and their influence on the language is also clearly evident. For over a hundred years, Australia developed in splendid isolation its unique blend of English, tempered by the hardships of heat and cold, deluge and drought, bushfires and cyclones. The harsh environment united people in a common struggle to survive. People helped each other. Strong communitarian loyalties were engendered. It is from this that the egalitarian character of Australia evolved. There is a strong emphasis on building a feeling of solidarity with others. Strangers will call each other "mate" or "luv" in a tone of voice ordinarily reserved for close friends and family in other parts of the world. Everyone was from somewhere else, and no-one was better than anyone else. A strong anti-authoritarian attitude became deeply embedded in Australian English. This was mainly directed towards their British overlords who still ran the country as a profitable colony. The Australian sense of humour is generally understated, delivered with a straight-face, and is often self-deprecating in nature. No-one wants to appear to be “up themselves”. Harsh or otherwise adverse conditions had to be met without complaint, so when discussing such conditions, it was necessary to do so with laconic, understated humour. Anyone not doing so was deemed a “whinger” (win-jer).Following World War II the American influence came increasingly to influence Australian culture and therefore the language. No-one is better at selling their popular culture to the world than the United States of America. Their pop culture is a beguiling instrument of foreign policy, so pervasive and persuasive it is. Young Australians enthusiastically embraced American culture, and since the 1940's the old established British language and customs have become blended with the American. If Australian English has a remarkable quality, it is the absence of regional dialects. It is spoken with relative uniformity across the entire nation. Brisbane on the East coast is a 4,300 kilometre (2,700 mile) drive from Perth on the West coast, yet there is little discernible linguistic difference between the two places compared with the difference, for example between Boston and San Francisco in the US. Nowhere else in the world do we see such linguistic uniformity across large distances.

A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land

A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land
Author: Simon Barnard
Publisher: Text Publishing
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre:
ISBN: 1922079340

Seventy-three thousand convicts were transported to the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land in the first half of the nineteenth century. They played a vital role in the building of the settlements, as well as the running of the newly established colony. Simon Barnard’s A–Z of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land is a rich and compelling account of the lives of the men, women and children who were transported to Tasmania for crimes ranging from stealing bread to poisoning family members. Their sentences, punishments, achievements and suffering make for fascinating reading. And the spectacular illustrations, each one carefully drawn in meticulous detail from contemporary records, bring this extraordinary history to life.

Dictionary of the British English Spelling System

Dictionary of the British English Spelling System
Author: Greg Brooks
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2015-03-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1783741074

This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It's a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters ) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables.

Creative Resilience and COVID-19

Creative Resilience and COVID-19
Author: Irene Gammel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-03-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000538230

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic. The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

Unflattening

Unflattening
Author: Nick Sousanis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015-04-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0674744438

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page. In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

British English, A to Zed

British English, A to Zed
Author: Norman W. Schur
Publisher: Facts on File
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2001
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780816042388

Provides information about British pronunciation, punctuation, and word use in comparison to American styles.