What a Pack of Drongos!
By nature, Curmudgeon is a critic, rather than a campaigner. He snipes from the sidelines, taking pot-shots, enjoying himself. But some things have been stewing in his mind, churning and bubbling like a witches’ brew, so insistently and for so long that the sniper feels compelled to turn activist and take a stand.
The lingering death of the Australian language has been getting under our skin for half a century. We’re talking about our once unique and colourful slang. True, we have picked up some pithy phrases from the Yanks and the Poms. But it has been at a cost to our own very individual lingo. We have stopped being true-blue Aussies. Allow me to give you a test so you can see just how far you have slipped. Here are a couple of dinkum old Aussie sentences; see if you can translate them into current usage. No cheating, now, no looking through old books that might give you a clue. Here we go …
I was on me pat, the other side of the black stump, mopey as a wet hen cause I’d done a motza at the red hots. I put the bite on Bluey but I had Buckley’s there, he’s a bloke with death-adders in his pockets. Don’t come the grouter on me, you drongo, he said, you wouldn’t work in an iron lung. I nearly dropped me bundle when I saw the missus coming; thought she’d give me the rounds of the kitchen but surprise, surprise, she was all over me like a rash. But when I put the acid on her, she wiped me like a dirty nose. So here I am like a shag on a rock, stiff as a crutch, fat as a match and on the nose with almost everyone. You don’t have to be dead to be stiff.
Before you go about your homework, let all pedants know we’re not suggesting anyone would have used so much Aussie slang in such a short time. Tests are artificial creatures. We’ll call this one the Drongo Test, because the bloke involved is a real drongo. We want you to translate the little story into plain conversational English and send it to us via the comments space below. We’ll publish the best of your answers and the winner can turn Curmudgeon for a day by writing one whingeing piece in a subsequent update of the blog (provided it is publishable). Contestants should also nominate their Drongo of the Year. Go to it …
Hold on, before you start, we’ll give you a hint. Drongo is an almost forgotten word in the Aussie lexicon. It has many aliases, such as no-hoper, boofhead, nong, ning-nong, drip, galah, twit, muggins … the list goes on. But in our view drongo reigns supreme as the ultimate fool, closely followed by galahs.
Galahs are those talkative rose-grey Australian cockatoos and the word is still used by many people to identify a genuinely dopey individual.
Curmudgeon believes drongo (in reality, also a bird, with bluish-green plumage) needs to be rehabilitated. We’ll give you a helping hand in your deliberations by outlining some people who might at times have been considered drongos.
Crikey, when you think about it there are so many candidates. Barnaby Joyce springs immediately to mind. Barnaby was sitting pretty as deputy prime minster when Eros fired a poisoned arrow into his heart, causing him to flee hearth and home, abandoning wife and multiple daughters, and take up with a young lady from his office. Even then he bungled an already sticky situation by saying he’d treat the baby of his pregnant paramour as his own, even if it wasn’t. Serious Drongo stuff.
But is his case any more compelling than Eddie McGuire’s? Eddie seems to be a natural, as we say in the Drongo-spotting business. The broadcaster doesn’t require outside help, he does it off the cuff, on-air: for recent instance, when he mocked a woman who was a double amputee and who was merely tossing a coin to start a football match. McGuire has very long, strong drongo form, including another on-air gaffe when he suggested that star indigenous AFL player Adam Goodes should be used to promote the musical King Kong, thus comparing an Indigenous man to an ape.
Many people would argue that Tony Abbott is odds-on to take the title. His record stretches back over 30 years from when he was a uni student to modern times as prime minister and now as reluctant back-bencher. He threatened to “shirtfront” Russian leader Vladimir Putin and, when questioned about the threat, replied on TV with an incomprehensible “you bet you are, you bet I am”. He offered Prince Philip a knighthood when the Royal Consort was already overloaded with titles and honours. We suspect that former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, who once described Abbott “as mad as a cut snake”, would be in Tony’s corner for the Drongo of the Year title.
Donald (M.A.G.A.) Trump: We apologise for opting for another politician, although the American president’s qualifications are so numerous and so well-known that we won’t bother to list them. Let’s sum it up by saying we have a 12-year-old playing world leader, so perhaps we’re all collectively drongos, with Donald leading the pack.
There are other late contenders such as Rugby’s gay-bashing Israel Folau, Nick Kyrgios of racquet-smashing fame (not to be confused with American racket-smashing Untouchable Elliot Ness), any of Rugby League’s dozen or so bad boys, or AFL’s half-dozen big-time troublemakers.
When we considered female exemplars Pauline Hanson came to mind, but on reflection we dismissed the notion. Pauline is a poorly educated bigot, but not a drongo. Schapelle Corby fits in the same category and so does her sister, Mercedes. We ran another three or four prospects through our mind without nailing a genuine drongo. Blimey, we’ve run out of female drongos — that must be good news. Then we did a mental search through history for women who might fit the bill and, you know what, we couldn’t unearth a single female drongo. Plenty of foolish ladies, mind you, but none with that extra edge of idiocy that would give entrée to the drongo club, or the galah gang. Curmudgeon in old age has discovered that the drongo culture is men-only. Although now that’s out, I guess we can expect a solid push by women for equal rights.
# Send your entries in the Drongo competition through our new interactive Curmudgeon Reader Service, otherwise known as comments. You can start a conversation on this piece, or through the comments attached to any other piece. We are currently updating Curmudgeon’s new home to take in all our items since the blog was established at its old residence.
What’s that post-turtle doing there?
Yankee-speak is altogether different. Although Curmudgeon is deeply distressed by the wholesale massacre of Oz slang through the invasion of American film, television and literature, we accept the Yanks have a genius for making new words that simply breathe meaning. Wimp is a good example.
There were various theories about its origin when it popped into the language a few decades ago, one of them that the US broadcaster and bigot Rush Limbaugh coined it as meaning Women Influenced Male Person. For readers lucky enough to be unaware of Limbaugh, we can tell you he is somewhere to the right of Genghis Kahn and Ray Hadley, regularly mocking the poor and disadvantaged on his national radio show.
On television when Bill Clinton was president, Rush did a segment about dogs while a photo of Bill and Hilary’s daughter, Chelsea, was displayed on screen. He later claimed it was an accident caused by one of the TV crew. But Curmudgeon reckons Rush is avoiding the truth; he is a wimp.
Putting Limbaugh aside, which is his rightful place, we acknowledge many expressions we commonly use — such as couch potato, ankle-biter, pig out, zonked, giggle juice, glad rags and many, many more — were invented in the US and are colourful additions to our language.
Our mate Peter Lander has drawn our attention to one we’d never heard of, post-turtle. It helps if you bring to mind the picture of a typical American redneck in bib ’n’ brace overalls, sucking on a stalk of grass. This old guy drawls: “When you’re driving down a country road, son, and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post-turtle. You know he didn’t get up there by himself. He doesn’t belong there; you wonder who put him there; he can’t get anything done while he’s up there; and you just want to help the poor, dumb thing down.”
It’s as American as apple pie or starting wars, and naturally various politicians have used it as a down-home illustration of whatever they’re about. The most famous was Bill Clinton’s explanation of the relative peace and prosperity during his reign in the White House. He’s saying it didn’t just happen by chance. It was like a post-turtle, someone had put it there.
Ah well, guess that beats our politicians’ catch-cries of “jobs ’n’ growth” and other inanities dreamed up by the spin doctors.
The banality of voting
Ah, elections! A time grab a drink, put up your feet and bask in the flood tide of banalities. A time when, if you close your eyes and listen to our smiling and sincere, earnest and concerned, caring but vitriolic leaders you’ll come to the conclusion that we’re living simultaneously on two planets hurtling around outer space, sometimes in danger of colliding, but always slipping away, each on its own trajectory, barely acknowledging the existence of its ignoble twin.
There once was a time when Left and Right more or less agreed on the issues and went at each other hammer and tongs, boasting how they would deal with them and which side was better equipped for the task.
There was a time when the politicians braved packed meetings in public places and took their chances in the rough and tumble.
(The urbane Robert Menzies in a packed town hall, heckled by a persistent critic: “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were the Angel Gabriel.”
“Madam, if I were the Angel Gabriel, you wouldn’t be in my electorate.”)
Such off-the-cuff wit is a thing of the distant past. Politicians in this country never risk taking on the mob. Their election gigs are staged-managed. If they say something witty or memorable, it’s because it has been worked over by a gaggle of speech writers, press secretaries and assistants. If politicians fluff their lines, it’s because they’re lousy actors, not failed wits. They still do have
a glimpse of the outside world on public walks but surrounded by a cohort of minders, ready to snuff out any sign of trouble
There was a time when representatives from the Left were from the working class and proud of it — shearers, boilermakers, shop assistants, bus drivers, you name it. They didn’t deny their roots, they weren’t ashamed of where they or their party came from, they simply wanted a better deal for their people. They were proud to call themselves workers and Labor voters.
And on the conservative side, there was no fiction that they had adopted “the battlers”. They represented money. Take it or leave it.
Those times have disappeared, not only here but also in other democracies. We cannot bring them back. So, charge your glasses and here’s to oblivion.
Hic.
Café politics
For a long moment Curmudgeon had an exhilarating bounce in the spirits that might fleetingly have taken him out of his accustomed location in the ranks of the grumps, grouches and churls. We were about to share a piece about how forgetfulness had led to a gentlemanly truce between Liberal and Labor in the seat of Adelaide in South Australia. You see, Liberal candidate, a young political novice named Shaun Osborn, sent out flyers inviting the ten thousand voting residents to drop in to Matteo Giordano’s little café, Pane e Latte, to discuss politics with him and, no doubt, be convinced the Libs were the way to go. This was all news to Matteo, who steers a careful politic line in his eatery, and in fact doesn’t have a vote but is something of a café diplomat. No worries, Matteo tells Shaun, I’ll invite Labor’s Steve Georganas along too. In his naivety, Curmudgeon imagined detente would be the victor and Steve and Shaun would treat it like a family get-together. Not so; it was politics as usual and even the minor parties got into the act. Matteo, the clear winner.
Quelle horreur!
For every silver lining there’s a cloud. There’s no need for us to see the pictures again of the Great Fire of Paris. If you didn’t get that sinking-in-the-stomach feeling as Notre-Dame blazed you must surely have an empathy deficiency, or bad eyesight. Hitler, now in his own conflagration, would have been laughing. While he never accomplished his wish to have Paris burned to the ground, here was serious damage to her heart. Coral-lovers of north Queensland might have taken heart when they watched Parisians form a human chain to rescue the sacred Crown of Thorns and other artefacts, though there’d be serious doubts that the tactic would work on the Great Barrier Reef predators of the same name. And still no sign of the Hunchback. Where are you, Monsieur?
