What did they just say?

Why is regional slang so hard to guess?

Because the individual words are usually ones you know. "Chuck your jandals in the chilly bin" contains no unfamiliar English, and it is still impenetrable unless you happen to be from New Zealand.

That is what makes slang different from a foreign language. With French you know you do not understand. With slang you can read every word and still have no idea, which is a more disorientating experience and, judging by how often these clips go round, a funnier one.

Which words mean the opposite either side of the Atlantic?

A few, and they cause real confusion in real meetings.

The first one is the one that goes wrong. An American saying "let's table this" means drop it for now; a Briton hears "let's discuss this now".

Where do these expressions come from?

More of them have traceable origins than you would expect, and the origins are usually stranger than the phrase.

Drongo, the Australian word for a fool, was a racehorse in the 1920s that ran 37 times and never won. Riding shotgun is from stagecoaches, where the person beside the driver carried the gun. Gong show comes from a 1970s television talent contest where bad acts were gonged off stage mid-performance. Jandals is a contraction of Japanese sandals, trademarked in New Zealand in 1957.

Others have no agreed origin at all. Nobody knows who Bob was, or why he is your uncle.

Common questions

Is this slang still actually used?

Yes, all of it. Nothing here is historical or revived for the sake of the game. Some skews older or more rural than others, and a Sydney twenty-something says "arvo" more readily than "fair dinkum", but every phrase would be understood without explanation in its own country.

Why does slang vary so much within one country?

Because it spreads through spoken contact rather than writing, so it follows the way people actually move around. British slang varies more over fifty miles than Australian slang does over a thousand, largely because Britain had centuries of settled regional communities and Australia was settled quickly by people who moved constantly.

Is Australian slang really disappearing?

Some of it, and the pattern is uneven. The shortenings are thriving: arvo, servo, bottle-o and the rest are used constantly by people of every age. The longer set phrases, like "fair dinkum" and "strewth", have drifted towards self-conscious or ironic use, which is usually how an expression starts to go.

Can I use these in writing?

Within your own country, in informal writing, usually yes. Across countries, no. This site avoids regional idiom in its own copy for exactly that reason: a phrase that reads as friendly at home reads as an error or a mistranslation to most of the world.