[tspiteri]

This reminds me of Ocean's Eleven, where everyone in the group effortlessly understood the Chinese member, but noone understood the British member when he said stuff like "We're in Barney" which he had to explain as "you know, Barney Rubble, trouble".

[JdeBP]

A second-level joke is that in reality "barney" is slang for "argument" or "fight", which British slang got from Australia in the 1920s according to Partridge. Its introduction to Britain pre-dates the invention of the cartoon character by about four decades.

In sporting slang from the century before, it used to mean a race/fight/contest that had been fixed or that was in some way unfair, a swindle.

* https://archive.org/details/slangdictionarye00hottuoft/page/...