# Musical jargon...



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I like to call a spade a spade, not an articulated dirt scooping device :lol:.

Unfortunately some writers on music seem intent on using jargon that goes way above the heads of most listeners, even quite experienced ones. I'm not sure what's the reason, is it just being pretentious, eg. trying to impress the reader with the writer's (supposed?) knowledge? Is it to shut some listeners out (eg. elitism, highbrow attitude). I really don't know.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about. Wolfgang Fink writing about the music of Pierre Boulez in the liner notes of a cd of his _Sur Incises _and other works:

"...In order to illustrate this fundamental change of attitude, he has suggested the image of a labyrinth - a structure involving ideas and experiences which, unlike the traditionally unambigious Euclidean language of forms, acknowledges new convolutions and directions to be discovered and patiently explored."

So basically, music that doesn't go along a linear path, it's like a labyrinth or maze, right? So why not just say that instead of mucking around and giving us all that waffle about "Euclidean language" whatever that means? Has writing about music become a kind of abstruse poetry or writing in code?

To give him credit, in the rest of the liner notes, Boulez himself comes across as more plain speaking (well, relatively) than the interviewer, Mr. Fink.

Anyway, I think it's better if a writer in music writes in simple English, not cluttered by this kind of jargon and gobbledigook. Some writers on music who I admire were Aaron Copland and also two of our own in Australia, Andrew Ford & Roger Covell. Simple English doesn't mean for morons, only that a reasonably educated person (eg. literate, well read, maybe able to read a broadsheet newspaper or something like that) can understand without too much trouble.

Of course, it's not only limited to musical field. There's sportspeak, pollie-waffle, suitspeak, & the worst is the Orwellian double-talk (garnered from "double-think"). Eg. calling mass murder or genocide to be "ethnic cleansing" is just ridiculous.

Anyway, give us your examples of unnecessary jargon used to describe music. & maybe some examples of good writing on music as well, if you want.

& what do you think about jargon? Good, bad, ugly? Thoughts?...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Something I wrote in another thread:



> Very nice conventional music. *Because I am extremely lazy could you put up the original series/row somewhere with all the retrogrades, inversions, retrograde inversions, re-inversions of the retrograde inversions augmented to a third of the original speed and transposed six semitones above, painted in pink polka dots and played in the middle register with the nose (if you included anything like that.)* Anyway, I did like the music and I think it's a great way to know tonality better by just going completely away from it a little bit and writing serial music. It's a bit like just getting away from something we all take for granted to do something a little different so when we come back to that something, we can understand it better. Well done on your compositions.


And I doublepluslike Orwell's "Newspeak" by the way.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

I enjoy reading elaborate reviews just to get ideas on how to write my own pretentious reviews, I find them very amusing to think of. Other than that, if I'm actually going to learn something or hear what someone else thinks, I agree with you, things should be much more straightforward. The example you cite has a lot of excess intellectual trimmings that don't assist the point it is trying to make. But, if this is done humorously, it can be very fun.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Something I wrote in another thread:
> 
> And I doublepluslike Orwell's "Newspeak" by the way.


I love you. Will you marry me?


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

^I am straight. 

And I am 14


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

clavichorder said:


> ...The example you cite has a lot of excess intellectual trimmings that don't assist the point it is trying to make...


Yeah, well that's a good way to put it. Even some of the overly florid - by today's standards - musical writings of the 19th century are more readily understandable than stuff closer to our own time.

As I suggested with these kinds of jargon & no less the media, politicians, suits, sport commentators, etc. use, it's actually not good overall for the English language. I'm thinking, if it goes on like this, will I need a special "jargon dictionary" to decode all these code words that could be better said in simple English?

George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of simple English who was in his prime 100 years ago now, would be surely spinning in his grave!...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

An example of a composer I've been listening to lately, Aussie Peter Sculthorpe, talking of his orchestral work _Kakadu _- about the Kakadu national park in Northern Australia, a rainforest area. I think what he says makes sense about this piece of music.

This is an example of what I think is good writing about music, in simple English -

"[the work] is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death."

From notes to Sculthorpe - _Earth Cry _and other works, ABC Classics label, publ. 1990, reissued 2002.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Sid James said:


> An example of a composer I've been listening to lately, Aussie Peter Sculthorpe, talking of his orchestral work _Kakadu _- about the Kakadu national park in Northern Australia, a rainforest area. I think what he says makes sense about this piece of music.
> 
> This is an example of what I think is good writing about music, in simple English -
> 
> ...


I don't have that recording.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I don't have that recording.


Sadly out of print, I believe. The late Stuart Challender was very good with our own Aussie composers. But you may find it to download on some site, or maybe second hand (if not selling for a fortune?). I think some of the tracks are on youtube, a couple were the last time I checked...


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

I don't find the language about labyrinths, etc pretentious; it's just lofty metaphors, not clinical or academic at all. If that's pretentious all poetry is pretentious. This is jar-ring-on [I'm James Joyce motherfuckas!].

http://www.talkclassical.com/2824-metal-music-death-metal-12.html#post38928

None of those clips you posted featured any of the following:

'Double, triple, quadruple and quintuple invertible counterpoint (the latter you can find in, for example, the last movement of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony).

Thematic development, transformation, combination of themes. Augmentation, inversion and diminution of themes in combination with other forms of a given theme - all the stuff you find in a Bach fugue.

Uses applied dominants, augmented sixths, Neapolitan sixths, modulation to the dominant, mediant, flattened submediant - prolonged counterpoint, prolonged harmonic areas. Sonata form movements, rondo movements, deceptive cadence, perfect cadence, plagal cadence.

Hexachordal combinatoriality, isorhythmic canon.'


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

^I love those words anyway.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

brianwalker said:


> I don't find the language about labyrinths, etc pretentious; it's just lofty metaphors, not clinical or academic at all. If that's pretentious all poetry is pretentious.


I think the point is that reviewers are _not_ poets, but so many of them (and journalists and writers of other kinds) think they are, or that they are as good as any poet, and so inject the most obtuse metaphors into a medium where plain-talking is much more valuable and desirable. I think in criticism, this stems from two things:

1) Talking about music is an incredibly subjective thing. Once you've discussed the composer's intentions, you find yourself in an abyss where any personal interpretation can take hold. Talking about that is both difficult and slightly pointless, so some people dress up really quite simplistic ideas in unnecessarily complex language to make it seem as though their insights are similarly complex. As with Sid James's example, to reference Euclidean geometry makes the writer _seem_ more intelligent than if he were to say the music is "maze-like" in structure, despite the fact that they both mean the same thing.

2) I'm not sure what literacy education is like in other countries, but when you're growing up in the UK, you are always told to keep a thesaurus to hand. You are taught this as an exact inverse to Orwell's "don't use a long word where a short one will do", as we are instead told, "don't use short words, because long ones are more interesting and make you sound smarter." A few years ago, I still believed that tripe, but now I see the value of simple language, and I don't think there is any excuse for someone to be writing in a metaphor-laden way if they're writing non-fiction (and even in fiction and poetry it should only be taken so far...).


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Polednice hit the nail on the head, so to speak.

RE brainwalker, to make it clear, my "target" is not really the technical language of musical analysis which you give examples of. I'm talking more of things like what's found in the liner notes of cd's, or on general books on music, or in the program notes when you go to a concert. That sort of stuff aimed at listeners generally, not only those intent on dissecting or analysing Bach or Mozart fugues, etc.

So I'm basically talking about writings about a piece of music, as a guide to giving access to it. Of course, technical analysis and other things like the inspiration or other source behind the work can't always be separated. I'm not arguing for that, I'm just against developing an unecessary mystique around music which is based on complicating things unecessarily...


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Some of the most convoluted sleeve notes that I have read (though somewhat informative) were English translations of notes originally written in another European language; often German translated into English. These were often translated by professional translator that just makes poor reading, paragraphs that were made up of two or three very long sentences.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

What may be most important in determining where "Jargon" is appropriate is identifying who your audience is going to be. Talking to music majors, jargon is most appropriate, because some technicalities can only be explained with rather complicated terminology. But if your audience is non-music major, or even non-_musical_, the writer should adapt likewise, and try to avoid even bringing up a concept that could trip people up, like Neapolitan 6ths. I mean, who needs to know what that is except another musician maybe? Talking about modulations is one of the most notorious, I think you need perfect pitch to pick them up listening to something for the first time.  Introducing the form of the fugue to a new audience could be complicated too, but it can be done, and done in a comprehensive way if one knows how to get to the level of the audience.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Here's a good one from Richard Wagner - yes the composer whom I usually love to hate! It's a translation of what he wrote about a work he admired highly, one of Beethoven's late string quartets, the Op. 131. Here, Wagner talks about the finale of that work -

"[It is] the world's own dance: wild delight, cries of anguish, love's ecstasy, highest rapture, misery, rage, voluptuous now and sorrowful, lightning's quiver, storm's roll; and high above, the gigantic musician."

Pretty good description, eh? Wagner could have been even talking of his own work, not Beethoven's. But his description of Op. 131 does do it justice, it kind of talks to how that work has every emotion under the sun in it. It has for me, anyway, and Schubert who basically thought this was Beethoven's finest achievement in the genre, would probably agree with me.

Source - Liner notes by David Moncur to Beethoven's late quartets, 3 cd set on Brilliant Classics label, played by LaSalle Quartet.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

That makes me think of how composers and conductors try to get people to play passages in a particular why by use of some rather creative metaphors. At times, I imagine the metaphors are so colourful that they have little effect (I remember one friend telling me that a passage was to be played "like deer frolicking in snow"). I recall that marvellous thread we had about Seigerstram's funny lines...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> ...Introducing the form of the fugue to a new audience could be complicated too, but it can be done, and done in a comprehensive way if one knows how to get to the level of the audience.


Glenn Gould did that ages back with So you want to write a fugue? I think this is a good way, but it's on television, so different of course than something that's just written. The best thinkers can boil down things to explain it to non experts in a succinct way which does not "dumb down" the thing they're explaining. It kind of takes a bit of lateral thinking as well, I think, & you cannot rely in this context on jargon or be too technical...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Steve martin, the American comedian and serious art collector, wrote an essay dealing with this very issue of jargon related to a given discipline... in this case, art. After citing a couple of semi-pretentious bits of art criticism he brings up the famous sculptural grouping of The Three Graces by Canova:











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Martin goes on to explore how various art critics might write about the sculpture, from a formalist point of view, discussing the flow of the line and interweaving of forms... or from a feminist view, questioning the objectification of women... But then Martin calls attention to the fact that the Three Graces has long been admired for presenting three of the finest female asses in the history of art.:lol:

Martin admits himself to having perused this aspect of the sculpture while making sure to circle to entire work so as to not appear too drawn the aesthetic of the Callipygian.:lol:

He goes on to admit that while an appreciation of the shapely buttocks is certainly part of the experience of the Three Muses, he would not desire the art historian or art critic to draw attention to the "three finest asses" in some large art history tome. Various jargon has its use under various conditions and when directed at various audiences.

Within the field of art, we have what is commonly known (and derided) as art speak. One need only look to such sites as:

http://10gallon.com/statement2000/

or:

http://www.artybollocks.com/

Yet in all reality, most of the specialized jargon used by artists is simply the vocabulary of the vocation. Doctors, lawyers, electricians, artists, and musicians all employ a vocabulary unique to their profession in order to help communicate specific ideas concerning elements unique to their profession.

Thematic development, transformation, combination of themes, augmentation, inversion and diminution of themes, fugue, sonata, tone poem, applied dominants, augmented sixths, Neapolitan sixths, modulation to the dominant, mediant, flattened submediant, prolonged counterpoint, prolonged harmonic areas, movements, rondo movements, deceptive cadence, perfect cadence, plagal cadence, Hexachordal combinatoriality, isorhythmic canon... all of these are terminology dealing with specific elements in music. I cannot see how their use is pretentious.

The example Sid cited:

_"...In order to illustrate this fundamental change of attitude, he has suggested the image of a labyrinth - a structure involving ideas and experiences which, unlike the traditionally unambigious Euclidean language of forms, acknowledges new convolutions and directions to be discovered and patiently explored."_

on the other hand, sounds as if were geared toward an academic audience.

Picasso once wrote, _"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."_

To a great extent, I agree. As a student, we endlessly discussed the rules, the composition, the use of tangents, how the artist had employed a dominant triad of colors, the use of line, etc... As a teacher, I do this with students... but talking with other artists we rarely go into formal analysis of another's work. There is an assumption that we all know the "rules". Rather we might speak of art in terms closer to Wagner's gushing praise over Beethoven's Op. 131...

"[It is] the world's own dance: wild delight, cries of anguish, love's ecstasy, highest rapture, misery, rage, voluptuous now and sorrowful, lightning's quiver, storm's roll; and high above, the gigantic musician."

Or like Picasso we might talk about where to get cheap turpentine... or make cryptic emotional statements like, "To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^ Yes audience is important, but the quote about the Boulez piece I gave in my OP, it can be many things. Good - & by that I mean clear - writing it ain't.

In a review of this disc HERE, Steve Schwarz has the same issue with exactly what I was talking about. I did a search of reviews of the disc, and this is what I found. It's basically same as what I said, and probably he's more vicious than I was -

"...However, one thing I knew after a couple of sentences: ignore the liner notes by Wolfgang Fink, *typical European self-absorbed windbaggery*, which aims not to illuminate the pieces, but to show the smarts of the writer (it fails). *Moreover, it's plain bad writing*. Some small examples will suffice...

...Of course, the passage means very little other than the writer has substituted vocabulary for thought (*does the writer know what the phrase "Euclidean language of forms" means, for example? If so, I suspect he may be the only one*), but it does offer the advantage that you needn't hear the pieces in question to come up with the prose.* Later on, he says the "music unfolds like a prism." As far as I know, prisms neither fold nor unfold.* The notes also include Fink's interview with Boulez. It's a sad state of affairs when Boulez is the clearest writer in the room..."


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

In my studies in the past of Modern history and art history/theory, the worst area was film studies. It had at least a dozen specific technical and theoretic words, jargon, in French because that was where moving film started. The only term I can remember funnily enough is _mis en scene_. It's like they developed their own lingo, a bit like the doctors and lawyers with all those terms in Latin, a dead language. & of course, as a student studying the film area, reading things like academic journals on film, it was bloody hard. I don't read French and they didn't give a glossary of terms. They should keep in mind that not only experts in the field read these journals, so do students! & God forbid, so does the general public wanting to know about this stuff, on the off-chance. But my opinion is that this use of other languages is more to keep others out, a bit like the Great Wall of China - keep the Mongolian barbarians out, and some say keep the Chinese in. It's like a knife that cuts both ways.

I basically agree with George Bernard Shaw. Language should be modernised as much as possible. Clear the deadwood. Some composers after 1945 began to use notation in their native language - eg. English markings such as fast instead of allegro in English speaking countries. Even some emigres to the USA like Hindemith used them once they got there. Mahler & Bruckner used both their native German and some Italian markings (they mixed it up). There is an argument for tradition, but when that tradition is clearly outdated and of little use to the wider society who aren't experts, well, maybe it's time for a change? But people are resistant to change, even if it's necessary.

Of course, jargon is worse than that, in terms of jargon that's made up and not "real," has no history behind it. It has not meaning, it's just pretension. Like the liner notes by Mr. Fink to the Boulez cd I talked of in my OP. Basically language has to have some meaning, and for the wider group, the more inclusive it is, the BETTER...


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

I don't know if you can get Private Eye on your side of the planet Sid, but I think you'd enjoy Pseuds' Corner.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I don't know much about it, but I know the term "pseudo-intellectuals." It's sometimes used as a put down but those on either side of politics against the other side. Eg. right against left, or vice versa. "Left-wing pseudo-intellectuals" or right-wing ones. Of course, they don't use it against their own side. It's strictly tIt for tat.

It's the same with terms like "elites." Right wing elites call left wing elites "elites." Again, vice-versa. Basically, all this means is "people I (or "we") don't like." 

Stalin's "formalism" and Hitler's "degenerate art" where exactly the same. Rubbery definitions for those, regarding how they were carried out in practice anyway. Just used as an excuse to get away with the horrible things they did. Language as a tool for the worst things in their case.

So yeah, why don't they just call a spade a spade, so to speak? Basically because that would be exposing their biases, preferences, politics, etc. Same old story...


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

*Sid James wrote:*



> I don't know much about it


Here are some excerpts collecting contributions:

http://www.cix.co.uk/~stevemann/pseuds.htm

http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/pseud(1).html


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^Thanks for that. It's exactly what I mean.

In the first website you posted, at the bottom is a classic example of corporate "suitspeak" - another thing I really love to hate. This is the type of jargon that ostensibly says everything but really says nothing, or very little at least.

I see it as a distortion of the English language. The people who have their jobs to write this rubbish, I basically think they're doing violence to the English language. They're debasing it. Yet they're "respectable" people, they're not beat poets or hippies like Alan Ginsberg was. He was like any poet, being creative. But this example below is not creative or artistic, it's just plain rubbish -



> *Sharpening efficiency*
> We will deliver a systematic and sustained programme of efficiency and measures for improved effectiveness, translated into sustainable local delivery to ensure the delivery of more stretching centrally derived targets. There will be more emphasis on local ownership and accountability for the identification and delivery of efficiencies.
> *Communicating and influencing*
> We will use clear and focused communications…
> (Environment Agency website publication The Vision for our environment: making it happen)...


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## Chrythes (Oct 13, 2011)

Even Seneca in his Letters to Lucilius talks about the meaningless and absurd linguistic manners of some philosophers when trying to teach the "unwise" ones - instead of using simple and direct language that would appeal to the recipients the best, they decorate it with needless words and ornaments, to the degree when all meaning is lost and empty linguistic beauty is left. The same as Stalinist architecture. 

Personally I have nothing against academic jargon. It sometimes helps to state a point better and more efficiently, using less words and descriptions that would probably be needed when explaining various phenomenons or processes. It should be used in context though - when an article or a speech is supposed to be public, as in appealing to a big audience (when most are not educated in that sphere), it should use the less jargon as possible, as when on the other side - when applying to a specific, academic audience it's probably going to be more efficient when the jargon is used.


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## jalex (Aug 21, 2011)

Polednice said:


> That makes me think of how composers and conductors try to get people to play passages in a particular why by use of some rather creative metaphors. At times, I imagine the metaphors are so colourful that they have little effect (I remember one friend telling me that a passage was to be played "like deer frolicking in snow"). I recall that marvellous thread we had about Seigerstram's funny lines...


The great horn player Philip Farkas was once told by an eminent guest conductor at the Chicago Symphony to play as if he were playing 'to his beloved across a valley from a log cabin in the mountains' (or some vague metaphor like that). His blunt reply: 'Do you want me to play _louder _or _softer_?'.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

According to Alex Ross in _The REst is Noise_, Schoenberg was no fan of jargon, even from his fans and groupies like Theodore Adorno. A relevant quote below, but HERE is it's whole context in the book. It goes on to basically say what I was saying, the jargon and gobbledigook was not helping the wider classical music listening public to access or understand his music -

*"...Schoenberg disowned Adorno's attacks on Stravinsky ("One should not write like that") and found little more to like in the theorist's panegyrics to atonality ("this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors")..."*


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Sid James said:


> Yeah, well that's a good way to put it. Even some of the overly florid - by today's standards - musical writings of the 19th century are more readily understandable than stuff closer to our own time.
> 
> As I suggested with these kinds of jargon & no less the media, politicians, suits, sport commentators, etc. use, it's actually not good overall for the English language. I'm thinking, if it goes on like this, will I need a special "jargon dictionary" to decode all these code words that could be better said in simple English?
> 
> George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of simple English who was in his prime 100 years ago now, would be surely spinning in his grave!...


This is rich Sid coming from an Aussie--English has almost become another language over your way. did you go to Unie by chance, well g'day now. Bernard Shaw is spinning, but he also had the Esperanto bee in his bonnet.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

^What on earth _is_ Esperanto? An artificial European language isn't it?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^*moody* - Aussie English seems to be dying out a bit here, replaced by corporate type suitspeak. Not many use the greeting "g'day" now, although I do. In some contexts here, it sounds almost wierd, from another planet. Some other old Aussie words like "cobber" or "old codger" are now dead and buried. Things like "diggers" are still used to describe war veterans, but usually only on Anzac Day (the day we honour our war dead). The "have a nice day" American thing is what you hear everyday now, at the checkouts of supermarkets, etc. I don't mind that, I've gotten used to and desensitised to it. OUr slang is not always readily understandable to foreigners, but it can also be said that it's getting thinner on the ground decade by decade, replaced by the bland meaningless global suitspeak, which probably originated in USA, but I'm not targeting them, the USA has contributed good things to the world as well, but that's another issue...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

^I think Aussie English will become extinct within a decade. People at my school have even started speaking in English accents.


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> ^What on earth _is_ Esperanto? An artificial European language isn't it?


It was a world language and at one time it was taken fairly seriosly, what the position is now I don't really know


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> ^I think Aussie English will become extinct within a decade. People at my school have even started speaking in English accents.


Bless the Lord, have they also stopped going up at the end of a sentence and looking upwards out of the corner of their eye when they talk?


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Sid James said:


> ^^*moody* - Aussie English seems to be dying out a bit here, replaced by corporate type suitspeak. Not many use the greeting "g'day" now, although I do. In some contexts here, it sounds almost wierd, from another planet. Some other old Aussie words like "cobber" or "old codger" are now dead and buried. Things like "diggers" are still used to describe war veterans, but usually only on Anzac Day (the day we honour our war dead). The "have a nice day" American thing is what you hear everyday now, at the checkouts of supermarkets, etc. I don't mind that, I've gotten used to and desensitised to it. OUr slang is not always readily understandable to foreigners, but it can also be said that it's getting thinner on the ground decade by decade, replaced by the bland meaningless global suitspeak, which probably originated in USA, but I'm not targeting them, the USA has contributed good things to the world as well, but that's another issue...


I dislike that "have a good day" thing because they do it hear where we have the worst customer service in the western world ,whereas (that looks completely wrong--oh,well--whatever) the Yanks actually mean it! Your problem is the dreadful Aussie soaps that are shown hear daily they still speak the Aussie speak.
As for Old Codger, I didn't even know it was Australian, in any case I thought that was ME!


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

moody said:


> Bless the Lord, have they also stopped going up at the end of a sentence and looking upwards out of the corner of their eye when they talk?


I didn't even know they did that in the first place.


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I didn't even know they did that in the first place.


 Good, well for Heaven's sake don't start now.


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