I’d spent the morning listening to Wendy, who’ll be teaching the first two
Fridays of the quarter filling in for another CAPA-hired local lecturer
Lorraine (who was double booked running some arts festival during her son’s
school holidays)(If you get the idea that teaching these programs abroad means
lots of improvising and fast footwork, you’d be right--and even this morning,
when Wendy handed out the syllabus, I had a surprise, as suddenly the class was
supposedly meeting from 9-12:30 and not from 9 to 12 as every other version of
it had said)(I nixed the extra half hour, much to my students’ relief). I’d enjoyably had coffee with Lorraine
soon after I’d arrived here, and she’d assured me Wendy was super high energy in a super small
package, and she was right. Maybe
something about teaching styles will be the focus of another post, but I
thought since I’d had so much to listen to, so idiomatically (not to say
ultra-coherently), that I’d do a bit of linguistic analysis, some of which I
did on the fly for my students, most of whom were far too polite to realize
they had no clue what was being said.
We learned during the lecture that Wendy had done her
graduate work (in sociology? anthropology?) on toys and their meanings, and
though the reading for today’s topic of “Australian Identity” centered on how
the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games illustrated ways in which
nations selectively exploit and distort their own myths, much of her
presentation was a string of mini-raves and tangents sparked by student
questions or by her own questions or by her long reactions to a minimal student
answer. It was all a bit like
listening to a smart, articulate, hypercaffeinated but slightly dotty aunt for
an hour and a half, and then after a 10-minute break, coming back, watching a
couple of video clips (the beginning of the Opening Ceremonies, and a couple of
QANTAS commercials) and listening some more. Not much writing, not much co-teaching. But hey.
We learned of the “cultural cringe” that characterizes a
lingering sense of Antipodean inferiority or ambivalence, at the same time
Australians take pride that “we punch above our weight” in sports and other
areas; as part of a riff about the educational system we heard that “bluestone
universities” were at the top tier, and that of course there were people at Uni
with her who were “just bludging off the system,” but that she felt an
obligation to give back, to not take for granted that she had actually been
paid to be educated back before the fees and privatization had radically
changed the educational landscape here as well.
As she spoke I was struck by the “two nations separated by a
common language” truism, and gave up trying to serve as interpreter for my
wide-eyed students: how many of them would get the boxing analogy of a
flyweight with a punch like a middleweight, much less the analogy between
“bluestone universities” in Oz and the whole Oxbridge / redbrick / steelglass
hierarchy that used to hold in the UK?
Her passing clarification, “you have your ‘Ivy League’ schools” was
technically correct but inadequate, and I’m sure none of the UCD students had
an idea that “bludging” meant cadging or clumsily borrowing or being lazy long
before J.K. Rowling’s co-opted “Bludger” as a menacing ball in the wizarding
sport of Quidditch.
It went on, and on, and on, and only occasionally did I
interject. When she talked about making fun of someone, “taking the mickey out
of them,” I stopped her and asked my students what it meant--was it making fun
of the Irish (the Micks) or perhaps Cockney rhyming slang for “taking the
Mickey Bliss / piss” out of someone?
More fun with words, and the exact etymology as I said is open to debate. As she talked about how sports-mad
Australians were, especially this weekend which features the equivalent of the
Super Bowl of Aussie-Rules footie and that of Rugby League, there would be
people “barracking for Hawthorn, or barracking for Sydney,” I realized I’d
better warn my little ducklings about a potentially embarrassing linguistic
difference they probably weren’t aware of: they’d better not use the verb
“root” in reference to following a sports team (recall “For it’s root, root
root for the home team” sung in the seventh inning stretch at baseball games),
since in Oz the verb is literally a four-letter word referring to, well,
intercourse. (This is a family blog.)
Years ago one friend from Down Under had been travelling on Super Bowl
Sunday and his Yank seatmate asked him, “Who are you rooting for?” to which my
friend replied, “That’s a mighty personal question, mate!”
Of course, after I got home I met my neighbor Clive from the
apartment next door, and in five minutes I noted several more examples of this
linguistic variety that I found inexplicably endearing: I was carrying out my
trash and recycling, and he cautioned me that the rubbish bins hadn’t been
picked up that day (“I’ve already had a word with the Council, mind you”) and
that there was no room in the bins for my bag: “Look at that, they’re both
chockers!” Nowhere in the US would
you hear that, maybe nowhere else in the world would a speaker take “they’re
chock-a-block” or “chock-full,” clip it down to “chock” and add the “ers”
ending. Listening to ‘Strine, indeed.
