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Listener books editor Mark Broatch has just written a book about 100 words and phrases that define us as Kiwis. Here, he shares five of his favourites.
Accent
Decades ago, a piece of graffiti appeared on a Sydney wall: “New Zealand Sux”. Some time later, someone added a colon and two more words, “Australia Nil”.
New Zealand English is instantly recognisable for three main things: the numbers of te reo words we employ, the unique way we pronounce our words, and the terrible, seemingly accurate insult that we don’t fully open our mouths when we do so.
“The NZ accent is just mumbling,” reckoned director Taika Waititi, “but it’s beautiful mumbling. It’s turning mumbling into an art form.”
It’s not a new thing. English author and critic Frank Swinnerton met Katherine Mansfield in 1912 and said she “spoke in a carefully modulated murmur, hardly parting her lips, as if she hummed or intoned her words”.
It’s a shock the nation doesn’t produce more ventriloquists.
Then there’s our ex-sent, sorry accent. To outside ears, our “bit” has begun to sound like “but”, our “bat” like “bet” and our “bet” like “bit”. “But” might be heard as “Bart”. “Beer” and “bare” are often indistinguishable. To Australians, the Kiwi “six” sounds like “sucks” and “deck” like “dick”, while to NZ ears the Australian “fit” sounds like “feet”.
No one precisely knows how these vowel changes happen, and the New Zealand one occurred a couple of centuries after British English went through its own Great Vowel Shift. Where did Kiwi English come from? It seems to have largely developed out of Australian English, southern English and touches of Scottish and Irish, blended in the mixed populations of militia towns and gold-mining settlements. The accent became widely noticeable from about the 1890s.
Pack a sad
We may not be the most linguistically inventive of nations, but we’ve come up with some doozies of insults. There is the unmatchable egg! – a fool, a nitwit, though it’s regarded as generally mildly insulting, and can be said with exasperated affection. A hua can be insulting, as when Sean Plunket called Eleanor Catton “an ungrateful hua”, or a more neutral description – he’s a big hua. It comes from whore, but that connotation has disappeared from NZ English.
There’s dill, also meaning an idiot, and skody, meaning disgusting. But if I had to name only one Kiwi example of shade-throwing, it would probably be “pack a sad”. We know it to mean becoming sullen or depressed, or to have a tantrum, or for something to stop working, as in “the dryer packed a sad”. How do you pack a sad? You take something that usually means to load or carry, and then you make an adjective into a collective noun ... It was noted by slang watchers in 1972, employed by Joy Cowley. “Mum’s going to pack a sad ... I don’t want to be the one to tell her.”
Bugger
Many will remember the fond and frequent use of “bloody”, but it was claimed as “The Great Australian Adjective” as early as 1897, by the expat English writer WT Goodge – even if the actual word was bleeped out in every line of the poem for being too rude: “The sunburnt ---- stockman stood / And, in a dismal ---- mood …”
Bugger was, at one time, probably our favourite curse word. After a long-running series of ads for the Toyota Hilux ute featuring good keen man Barry Crump and city slicker Lloyd Scott came others with a laconic farmer who would regularly underestimate the power of his vehicle. His only words were “bugger!” or “ooh, bugger me!”. About 120 complaints made their way to the Advertising Standards Authority, which decided the word was unlikely to cause serious offence.
We still use the word plenty – “bugger up”, “bugger all”, “bugger me”, “buggered”, as well as “bastard” (“It’s a bastard,” said a pilot on TV about flood damage), though younger aficionados of cursing are likely to have moved on to the F-word and perhaps the C-word.
It’s possible shit has become the Kiwi expletive du jour. Things are shit hot or shithouse, people are shit-stirrers or as thick as pigshit, the last seemingly a NZ special. Asked by an interviewer if he was relieved Whangarei had escaped tsunami damage, district council chief executive Rob Forlong said, “Oh shit yeah.”
Cuzzy
NZ English has spawned a curious variety of what linguists call “clipping”: we shorten words and add “-ie” or “-y”, like cuzzy for cousin. It may be due to the influence of Scottish or northern English migrants, or a kind of egalitarian instinct in Kiwi speech towards informality. Compare the ambo, servo, garbo tendency in Australian English.
If you got someone to your house to do maintenance, you’d call a tradie, maybe a chippy, sparky or chippy, offer them a bikkie or sammie at lunchtime, maybe see if they’ll do a cashie job. If it’s cold you might put on a cardie or fill yourself a hottie while you’re searching online for a prezzy for your rellies. If they do a terrible job, you might throw a tanty.
Author Keri Hulme was on to it early. As Kerewin, a character in her Booker Prize-winning 1984 novel The Bone People, vented: “This godzone babytalk. Hottie lolly cardie nappy, crappy the lot of it.”
Aussie
New Zealand and Australia share a lot of our words. We both “bag someone”, “cark it”, “fossick”, look for a “skerrick” of something, tut about hoons and bogans. While Australian English is well tracked by their national dictionary, the Macquarie (the NZ Dictionary Centre closed down in 2012 after 15 years in operation), dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary often can’t separate our vocab, claiming many words are used in both countries that are not.
It’s a point of pride that we say duvet and they say doona (a brand name at one time). We call it a chilly bin, they call it an esky (also a trademark). But how about donga, goon, bingle, dardy, shelf (temporary accommodation, boxed wine, a minor collision, cool or worth buying, and inform on someone, respectively)?
There are particularly splendid Aboriginal uses of English: “rubbish” (not dangerous), “humbug” (pestering), “cheeky” (cunning) and “gammon” (inauthentic). Kiwis still say something was “hard yakka” for physical work, the latter word also borrowed from an Aboriginal language, but the te reo word mahi is increasingly used. Mahi is employed in NZ English to mean something like “effort” even if it’s not digging ditches – do the mahi.
A few words that we share can mean something entirely different. In NZ, “crook’ almost always means ill, but in Australia it also means unsatisfactory or unpleasant: “I never knew the weather could be so crook.” A “dag”, meaning a character or hard case in NZ, also means a socially inept or awkward person across the ditch. Goolies are always testicles, never stones. “Toey” in NZ means agitated, but in Australia it can also mean sexually anticipatory … best to be sure of what you’re saying over there.
