Because it's fun to have diminutive version of many words. And because it differentiates us from boorish Americans - or as they are also known in Oz, seppos.
seppo is short for septic, which is short for septic tank, which rhymes with yank, and yank is a word used for any American. And although yank comes from yankee, we mostly don’t discriminate between north and south so it is a general term.
Like all words in Aussie only context can make it insulting - it can just as easily be used in a friendly way. Apparently the word seppo is not used much, maybe mostly by older Ockers. I’m summarising a long discussion on the word and usage that goes into more detail: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-australians-call-a...
> what is it with Australians and having the cheesiest names for everything
It is just language diverging memetically. A small part of it is signalling you are not a stuck up snob.
The wannabe hoity-toity “I’m better than you”-types try and change their accent and word usage to match some “educated” upperclassish snobby accent and then they speak down to others and try to correct their English. Some of the snobby accent is memetic - due to hanging around a particular social group.
The accusation of baby-talk and cheesy comes across as aggressively stuck-up to me.
I’m from New Zealand and it is fun to see some snobby bitch get drunk and then hear her accent shift to some bogan accent(≈hick drawl) from their childhood. I’ve seen the same thing with some suits in a bimmer in a wealthy suburb change their whole demeanour to rural farmer-types given circumstances. In New Zealand farmers are often wealthy and their kids often get expensive private education and move into professional jobs.
I once saw a sign in Australia warning about crossing train tracks. In the land of the free, the sign would have all the coziness of a Secret Service agent:
KEEP OFF TRAIN TRACKS - $100 FINE PER VIOLATION
But this was Australia. So it actually read something like this: "Cross tracks safely and only at the provided walkways. Or cop a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate!"
That's arguably a lot better than the British ones:
- They give an safe, alternative action, which might not be obvious to some people.
- They state the authority by which the fine is issued (too small to read fully from the photograph, but something like "...Regulation 2003"). Interestingly, a historical railway sign preserved at Beamish has the name of the officer by whose authority the fine would have been issued at that time[1].
- The fine is given as 'up to' the maximum. As I understand it, the British fine is only £1000 if it can be proved that the violation was made wilfully, and non-wilful trespassing is usually (perhaps always?) only subject to a fine if done subsequent to having received a warning.
The English/British and their media are not as jarringly foreign as Americans, because Australian culture and language diverged from English culture much later than American did.
There's also 5x fewer of them, so they are less of a threat to our minority culture than Americans are - Americans don't realise just how dominant American English is in the Anglosphere and how hard it is to resist.
Australian slang represents something important about Australian values - mateship, the Anzac spirit, a fair go. Aussies don't talk like poms, because they aren't like poms.
I posit that its due to hardship - not to suggest all Australians are super hard off, but it is certainly true that acronyms/shortened words are more common in rural (think high intensity physical labor) or speed-sensitive contexts (think Wall Street, engineering jargon in a engineering context, such as software, or SMS text-messaging).
Given their origins as a prison labor camp, coupled with a legitimately difficult environment (hot, arid, isolated by thousands of miles of ocean, fairly wild/aggressive wildlife such as crocodiles, snakes, kangaroos), their propensity to shortened, almost mono or duo-syllabic words makes plenty of sense in that context.
And finally I've seen the (variation of the) argument usually applied to the Russians, about their slavish nature ("During the Stalin's reign, half of the country was in jail and the other half was the jailers" etc.) leading to the impossibility for them to form a civilized and liberal society, which is usually retorted with an example of the Australians... being applied to the Australians itself.
No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
> No, one doesn't need to be of good breed to be freely able to speak multisyllabic words.
Eh? Not what I'm saying at all. Breed has nothing to do with it... circumstance has much more to do with word shortenings... not sure what I got downvoted for...
I suspect it is just something we picked up from our British heritage, the whole slang thing.
Apple and Pairs, Up the Stairs - all that.
I do find it funny when some folks have been here for a few years and they have picked up all the slang. Someone I used to know had been here for 10 years but still had a very thick Italian accent. It was always a joy when he would bust out a sentence like "I took the mars bar up the Tulla but it was right chockers. All I wanted for a Chook!". Translated, "I took the car up the freeway but there was a traffic jam. I wanted a hot chicken."
