The English language is a mysterious animal. Having snagged so many words from other languages through the millennia, it isn't the least bit consistent. Imagine being an immigrant who is trying desperately to learn/understand the language!
I'm not talking dialectic pronunciations, here. I'm talking words. Americans speak a different version of English than, say, British do...or Australians. And unless one is a world traveler--unlike most Americans--the spoken expressions of any English-speaking citizens in other parts of the world can sound foreign.
I lived in Japan for awhile as a 10-year-old. I got angry when my Japanese friend's mother--really the only English speaker in the family--pulled out an English Bible given to her by Christian missionaries and asked me to explain passages to her. I wasn't angry with her. I was angry with the missionaries. There are people who devote their entire lives to studying and understanding the Bible with all its translations. How can anyone expect to drop a Bible into the laps of people who weren't raised in a church or English as a native language and expect them to understand a book not even written in their own tongue?? I'm still not over that...
But back to the point I am trying to make. I have an online pen pal from South Australia. They speak English there, and their dialect is recognizable worldwide. She and I trade comments almost daily; she from her home in the Southern Hemisphere, and me from mine in the Northern. Obviously, there will be some terms that we don't understand from each location, but who cares? We both get it. Except recently.
A couple of days ago, my friend started a narrative about how her husband, who was going fishing with a "mate", disrupted her sleep in the early morning hours as he prepared to depart. She started her tale with, "Hubby is going fishing at sparrow fart." It took me a minute to understand that sparrow fart was not a place, but a time. Since birds sing at dawn, I figured sparrow fart was part of the sunrise experience, but I didn't know whether it was part of Australian English, or one of her own creations. So I asked.
I was informed that sparrow fart had been whitewashed. The actual expression, very common in South Australia, is "spoggy fart". Spoggy is a colloquial term for sparrow in SA (My Midwestern American grandfather called them "spitzies". It happens.) So, a spoggy fart is a time in the early morning. What we here in the US refer to as "the butt-crack of dawn", or "O-dark-thirty."
So...I have learned something. And now, so have you!
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