Brisbane’s West End is the sort of neighbourhood where every second shopfront is a café, a bookshop, or a café that used to be a bookshop.
My friend Stephen and I were driving through it when he offered his usual vivid description of a café. Grungy, he called it.
“What is grungy?”, I asked.
“That’s a place that’s not smick,” he said.
“What is smick?”
He did not want to get distracted. A wave of the hand, eyes still on the road. “Will tell you at the end of this drag.”
Now, “What is drag?”
By the second word I do not understand, I usually stop asking and start nodding, which is the international sign for a man who has lost the thread and made his peace with it. This time, I kept asking. And then sat down and thought about it.
The circular dictionary
This is how slang works. Every word is defined by another word you also do not know. The dictionary is circular. You cannot look anything up because the explanation needs explaining. The only way in is to have been there long enough that somebody shortened your name without asking, and you did not object.
Australians do not say afternoon. They say arvo.
Breakfast is brekkie.
Service station is servo.
Barbecue is barbie.
Take any word, cut it roughly in half, add an -o or an -ie, and move on. They do the same thing with names. Nobody is ever Robert. Robert was Robert for about a day, possibly at his christening, and has been Robbo ever since.
I know this because someone once asked me if I knew Stevo. I said no. I have known Stephen for years. Some bloke called Stevo, I had never met. Only to be introduced to the good old chap, grinning like he had been Stevo all along. Which, of course, he had.
Warmth, not speed
You would think this was a country in a terrible hurry. It is not. It is the most unhurried country I have spent time in. Nobody is rushing to compress afternoon because they are short on time.
They are probably saying arvo while standing in sunshine with a beer, looking at the ocean.
The compression is not about speed. It is about warmth. You shorten a word the way you shorten a friend’s name. Because the full version sounds like it arrived wearing a tie and you want it to take its shoes off.
A sampler, for the uninitiated
(From my list of wonder and polite inquiry. Invariably compiled after looking puzzled, stupid, or both in different parts of the world. When you do that often enough, you are essentially wearing a sign that says: I do not belong here.)
Australian.
No worries, the most successful Australian export after the flat white.
Mate, which ranges from genuine warmth to the opening move of a fistfight, depending on the jaw.
Reckon, a complete philosophical position in six letters.
Yeah, nah and nah, yeah, which are opposites and both make perfect sense.
Bogan, a very specific kind of person that every culture has and only Australia named perfectly.
Indian English.
These are the ones that slip out of me in other countries and earn a puzzled look.
Gyaan, unsolicited wisdom, usually from someone who has done none of the work.
Cutting, half a glass of Mumbai chai, half the price, and the entire economic philosophy of a city in one word.
Jhol, something not quite right, something being managed through channels that appear on no form. Mumbai runs on jhol the way plumbing runs on joints you cannot see. Everything works. Nobody can explain how.
Shana, someone who thinks they are very clever. In Mumbai this is said with a specific tilt of the head and the clear expectation that the cleverness is about to collapse in public.
Vetti, the Tamil art of having absolutely nothing to do and being perfectly content about it.
Mass, also Tamil, meaning something between cool, heroic, and slightly insane, often applied to a man walking away from an explosion he caused.
Dei, Tamil for roughly everything, from hello to are you out of your mind, settled entirely by intonation.
Guru, used in Bangalore not as a title. Guru, where is Koramangala? Nobody is actually calling you a guru. It is closer to listen, with a layer of courtesy that costs nothing.
Swalpa adjust maadi, which is not a word at all, it is a whole phrase, and arguably Bangalore’s constitution. It means please adjust a little. Said on buses, in queues, in any situation where three people are occupying space meant for two. A negotiation disguised as a request.
GenZ.
This is the list that has ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ mouthing the words in TV, much to the discomfiture of certain people at home.
Delulu, delusional, with the sting taken out.
No cap, I am not lying, said in a way that makes you wonder.
Slay, you did well, with more drama than the achievement required.
Rizz, charisma, if charisma were a competitive sport.
Ick, the opposite of rizz, arriving without warning and impossible to reverse.
The great lexicon flip
Sandeep Goyal, writing in Business Standard, made a sharp and lovely observation about the GenZ list. He called it the Great Lexicon Flip. The old public language of India, the Sanskrit-heavy, policy-document Hindi, was built to make you feel small. Weighty, polysyllabic, impossible to say in one breath. Then GenZ arrived and tore the curtains. Three-second words, built for thumbs, designed to travel at the speed of a swipe.
His argument is that Sanskrit cannot be abbreviated. Internet language can. You cannot shorten Sarvabhaumikaran, and you can shorten delusional to delulu. That is not a cultural argument. It is a bandwidth one.
My daughter would agree, though she would not use the word bandwidth. She would say it hits different. I would ask what that means. She would look at me the way Stephen did in the car. The look that says: I will explain, but you will need to keep up.
Three instincts
Goyal is right about GenZ. But the Australian evidence complicates things. Australians were compressing words in the 1940s, on beaches, with no screens and no hurry. They were not keeping up with anything. They were taking their shoes off.
And Indian English does something else entirely. It does not compress. It expands. It fills holes that English left empty.
English had no word for the specific pleasure of doing nothing with purpose, so we built vetti.
English had no word for the person who shows up with advice and no experience, so we gave the world gyaan.
English had no way of telling three people on a bus seat meant for two that this was fine, so Bangalore gave us swalpa adjust maadi, which is not a solution to the problem. It is a way of making the problem comfortable.
Three instincts.
Australia shortens words to bring them closer.
GenZ shortens words to make them faster.
India builds new ones because the originals had holes in them.
One nodding man
I frequent these worlds, and I switch without noticing.
In Mumbai someone will warn me about a lafda.
In Bangalore someone will call me guru before asking for directions I do not have.
In Melbourne someone will call me legend for holding a door open, which remains the most alarming compliment I have ever received.
In Madurai, where I grew up, dei did the work of an entire sentence, and the meaning depended entirely on whether the person saying it was smiling.
At home, my daughter will tell me something is giving, which apparently means it is good, and I will nod, which apparently means I am old.
These are only the worlds I have listed here. There are others. Singapore has its lah. London has cheeky, a word that grants permission for something you were going to do anyway. Every place I have walked through, every stranger I have spoken to in a café or a queue or on a bench, has had words that he didn’t think he had to explain. Because, everybody already knew.
Every time I land somewhere new, I soak up the air, find a café, and listen for the slang. Because the slang tells you what the brochure will not. It tells you what makes people laugh, what makes them comfortable, what they have shortened because they say it so often it wore down on its own, like a step in an old building.
I am beginning to think that slang is the truest language any place produces. The formal words tell you what a country wants to be. The slang tells you what it actually is.
Whatsay?