Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
case in point: the ‘Howard DJs like a mad cunt’ meme.
ALSO I’M SORRY IF I KEEP TAGGING YOU IN AUSTRAILIAN RELATED SHIT
BUT YOU”RE THE ONLY AUSTRAILIAN I KNOW
AND I MUST VERIFY
It’s all true, believe me. I reckon it has something to do with being geographically isolated and having a massive convict background during colonisation. Then you have huge immigration influxes from all over the world, and the fact that we like to shorten names into things like “Dazza”, “Maccas”, and “Shaz.”
Also, when they shout “Fang It!” in Mad Max Fury Road, that is a thing that is regularly shouted in the suburbs.
I don’t know why we evolved our language like this.
I’d wager a portion of it comes from the social structure originally applied to the country. Because so much of the population were convicts, the society built up around the notion of fighting authority or at least resisting it in some fashion. A lot of people came from poverty, obviously (because why the hell else would you be in prison for stealing bread?), lacked formal education and were illiterate. There was a tie-in with the influx of rural people in Britain looking for work if I remember correctly, which fed this problem of overcrowding in prisons in the first place. The point is that a large chunk of the prison population were poor, disenfranchised, from a certain geographical area or social group disproportionately affected by law enforcement.
For awhile (in the 1800′s there around) people from other countries joked you could tell if a person was Australian because of how they walked (the iron ball and chain).
And most of Australia’s current terminologies for homesteads and things were built around military or police terminology (that’s why we have stations, homesteads etc. instead of farms or ranches, whatever). Slang that was common to local dialects or communities (cockney for example) stuck around, presumably because a fair few of these people were poor and ran afoul of the law. So already just at Australia’s founding you have a culture that hates people in power. And my guess is that fed an attitude of disdain for authority in any form and a camaraderie towards those in the same boat as you. Social structures (and later political structures) reformed to favour or support the people fucked over by the system.
Which leads to the idea if you’re one of us, you’re a mate and we can slag you but we’ll act very nice to you if you’re in power but we all know how we really think of you.
I never knew any of this?
If I had ever gone to Australia before reading this I would have probably ended up insulting everyone I met … might still, because ‘excuse me, ma’am’ or ‘excuse me, sir’ is just ingrained in how I learned to speak english.
And I thought english people were crazy for having you in the singular person and you in the plural person…
(You in the plural person is Voi in Italian, which is a deferential way of referring to someone, possibly stronger than the ‘Lei’ [which no, has no relation to the female she (though that is *also* called lei), but is a specific form of respectful address] and definitely league above (as far as formality goes) about the ‘tu’ which is the singolar person you equivalent and is considered informal and colloquial.
This is 100% accurate for Aussie. New Zealand is slightly less so, but it does still sorta apply.
I’m usually pretty particular about the sorts of traits that get assigned as humanity’s “special thing” in sci-fi settings, but I have to admit that I have a weakness for settings where the thing humanity is known for is something tiny and seemingly inconsequential that it wouldn’t normally occur to you to think of as a distinctive trait.
Like, maybe we have a reputation as a bunch of freaky nihilists because we’re the only species that naturally has the capacity to be amused by our own misfortune.
Alien: Why are you happy? You’ve been seriously injured!
Human: *struggling to control laughter* Yeah, but I can imagine what that must have looked like from the outside, and it’s pretty hilarious.
Alien: …
Captain XXlr’y: First Officer Jane The Human, your olifactory protuberance is severely damaged! Why is this a matter for mirthful celebration???
First Officer Jane The Human: A SPARKLY LITTLE POMERANIAN THING WITH A GODDAMN UNICORN HORN CHASED ME STRAIGHT INTO A WALL! OH MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT? I RAN STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL.
Captain XXlr’y: Yes I just observed this sequence of events! It was terrible!
First Officer Jane The Human: OKAY WHO GOT THAT ON CAMERA, I WANNA SEE.
Captain XXlr’y: So you more fully understand that this is a situation you should never get into again?
First Officer Jane The Human: SO I CAN SEND THE VIDEO TO MY MOM!
Captain XXlr’y: For… for the solicitation of maternal concern…?
First Officer Jane The Human: NO, BECAUSE SHE’LL THINK IT’S HILARIOUS TOO.
viewings of the ancient human art based seemingly entierly around purposefully inducing misfortune are a source of constant xeno-anthropological arguments. As near as anyone can discern, these acts are some kind of core human performance form- so meaningful to their culture that recording these acts was very nearly the first concern on the invention of moving visual media.
Somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that these aren’t just recordings of accidental happenstance, but carefully choreographed, practiced, and refined to such a degree that there are nearly species wise recognizable symbols and routines performed.
There are thesis’ on ‘large wedding cake destroyed’, and hotly argued debate on the purpose of ‘Jackass’
Reblogging this again to suggest a different view of humanity, one where it’s not that we find injuring ourselves to be hilarious is the “defining quirk”. No, this one’s got to do with why you always want a human engineer or programmer (or both) if your ship’s going to be within two parsecs of a human.
Humans break things. They don’t mean to, and it can’t just be their curiosity – other species are curious, but they don’t break things like humans do. Humans make things stop working by trying to do things that they were never meant to do in the first place. I should know, I’ve seen it firsthand – one of the stubborn little bastards decided he was going to get the holodeck to show him an outdated media format called a “Vee-Ay-Chess”, and he spent twenty chrons trying to fix it after it started belching black smoke – and then he was at it AGAIN! And don’t even get me started on how he almost wiped our nav computer to try and play something called “Wolfenstein”.
But the scary part is, for every time it fails, there’s three times it works. There was a time when our warp drive broke down. You know, it was a Caledon Industries model, they’re cheap but they like to break. The problem was that it was a Tritium Reactron Fitting, and it got wedged in the back. Like, “take the ship apart and put it back together to get the fitting out” wedged. We were convinced we were going to be stuck for a few days before our signal got noticed.
And then the human – same one who broke the holodeck twice with his Vee-Ay-Chess crap and almost wiped all our nav data with his Wolfenstein game – he goes into the engine room and begins calling over the intercom for random tools, trash, parts of other things that were working just fine. He spends maybe twelve chrons in there, and when he comes out, he tells us to fire up warp. It sails us right to the nearest star system, no problems. And then the chief engineer takes a look at what he’s done. It looks like – I kid you not – it looks like the entrails of a Galthan Wingbeast. One that got splattered by a bomb.
Says he “jury rigged” it, whatever the hell that means, and we should get it replaced before it breaks again. And that’s why I never go anywhere without a human anymore.
Alien Commander: Is someone about to die or be seriously injured?
Human:….no…
Alien Commander: Than put that engine part back where you found it. Now.
Human: But you don’t even know what I was going to suggest!
Alien Commander: Did it involve the words combustion, fire, off-chance, or ‘you have to watch this’ ?
Human:…maybe…
Alien Commander: NO
Reblogging for that last dialogue. I just die every time one of us humans analyzes human behavior from an alien perspective. I want to know what is going to happen when the aliens realize we sometimes talk to inanimate objects when we bump them.
“Look, Sidney Crosby’s a busy guy, so I try to make his life a little easier.”
Them: Could you sum up Act IV Scene I of “Much Ado About Nothing”?
Me: Don John is like “what a shame, what a shame, the poor groom’s bride is a whore,” and literally nobody faces the results with poise or rationality.
Steel Phoenix Studios 