Todos sabem que os diversos sotaques do inglês são difíceis de entender. Mas o inglês australiano vai além!
Este texto é de nível intermediário.
As palavras grifadas têm explicação ao final do texto.
Australia's very own English terms
If you were told to ‘put on your cossies and thongs’, ‘grab the esky’ and ‘watch out for any Noahs’, would you know what to do? Well then, welcome to Australia!
Australia’s coastline has more than 30,000km and 10,685 beaches. 85% of the population live within 50km of the coast, which is home to seven of Australia’s eight capital cities. It’s not surprising: many Australians love the beach lifestyle. And many local terms relate to it.
For example: in Australia, a flip flop is called a ‘thong’ - not to be confused with the female underwear variety! Aussies might also call bathing suits ‘cossies’ (a shortened version of ‘costumes’) or ‘togs’, which is an abbreviation of the 16th-Century word ‘togeman’, meaning coat. And the term ‘budgie smugglers’ is the local name for male Speedo-style swimwear.
A ‘bogey hole’ is a local term meaning a protected inlet used for swimming. It comes from ‘bogey’, a word from the Aboriginal Dharug language, meaning to swim. And a bogey hole is the place where you can find 'bogans' - a very, very Australian word. Surfers used it for people from the suburbs who didn’t ‘belong’ on the beach. It is now used more generally to describe unsophisticated individuals.
Also, look out for ‘tea bags’ (swimmers who float around and get in the way of surfers); and body boarders, locally known as ‘esky-lidders’ (an esky is a portable cooler box for drinks) or ‘shark bait’/‘shark biscuits’ (as surfers believe they could easily become shark food). If you hear ‘There’s heaps of kooks out there’, look out for bad surfers. A great surfer is said to ‘rip’. When a surfer is inside a perfect wave, they say he/she is ‘in the green room’. And finally, a Noah is a shark - from Noah's Ark. So watch out for those!
Adaptado de um artigo da BBC. Você pode ler o original aqui.
Você também pode me ouvir lendo o texto no áudio abaixo!
VOCABULARY
Aussie (noun)
An Australian person.
Speedo (phrasal verb)
A type of tight swimming underwear for men.
Inlet (adjective)
A small arm of the sea, a lake, or a river.
Bait (noun)
Food used in a fishing rod to attract fish.
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