A Little Auslish and Alabama Coons

Bit of a dog's breakfast tonight. Some of you were a little bewildered by the Auslish in the previous post so an explanation of a couple of terms:

A 'Ute' (no nothing to do with indigenous Americans) is an Australian pick up truck only instead of being large, it's as if someone has cut away the back seat and the boot (er trunk) of a normal sedan and left it open. This is the vehicle preferred by a number of farmer's and tradesmen and is in fact a "Utility" vehicle . . hence now a "Ute". The 'tarp' is the covering for the back, now usually synthetic but once just a plain tarpaulin cover held in place with rope.

To "Pay someone out" is to give them a hard time. Stir them up . . .

The "Irish Mitts" is a phrase my father used to use. He and I both have 'square' hands. He used to refer to them as Irish Mitts, worker's hands. Nobody else in my family has hands like it with square palms and squatty fingers.

The "Crows" are the Adelaide Crows, an Australian Rules Football Team and the "Victor" is a lawnmower, (actually it's a 'Victa', shows you how often I mow a lawn!) an iconic brand of it's kind and again an early invention and institution for the 50's suburban man.

Yakka is a brand of workwear. Blue singlets, overalls, dungarees and hard wearing shorts and trousers . . it's become a part of the vernacular much the same way 'Hoover' has when we refer to a vacuum cleaner. Hard Yakka .. was and still is their slogan so a day of hard yakka is a day of hard physical labour.

A "Schooner" is our version of a pint. A large glass for beer. A size down is a Midi although in many pubs these days you can buy the old fashioned English 'pint'.

So nyah! Just as well I'm not writing for the world. Nobody would understand a word of it!

Now for something completely different . . . .

Way back in 2008 I wrote a post about a couple of Lullabies that my Grandma used to sing to her son, then my father sang them to us and we sang them to our own children. I often wondered how a Northern English, working class baker's wife even learned such a song which seemed to have it's roots in the deep South of America.

Out of the blue, as sometimes happens, I had a comment last week on that very post. An unknown commenter who gave me a link to a delightful You Tube clip of her wonderful elderly mother actually singing one of these old lullabies whilst being filmed by her Grandson.

Isn't the internet wonderful, some stranger, 12,000 miles away who just happened on a post from 2 years ago, had the same song sung to her as I did as a little girl in
and gave me the heads up on some of the lyrics that I'd long forgotten. Then four generations later and we're still singing about Momma's Alabama Coon . . only now we do it in suburban Australia to our own children . . takes six degrees of separation even further, through four generations and across three continents.

Awesome.