Friday, December 23, 2005

some slang

In the early days, when the house was still bare, and I'd just about managed to fill a tiny corner with an old analog TV that I'd bought for a ridiculously cheap price. The woman on the phone had said,- it's an old TV, but it works, so on the strength of that conviction, i'd said yes to the TV, especially because the woman was kind enough to offer to drop it off at the house. Anyway, the TV came, and I saw that it was so analog that it didn't even have a remote, and nor did it need an antenna to work. The woman saw the state of the house, bare from wall to wall, and in a spasm of compassion offered to sell us a futon at a damn cheap price. Subsequent negotiations over the futon- the thing was beastly big- did not function as smooth and eventually, we lost touch. But what struck me during the entire affair was the fact that the woman seemed to be using an aussie slang term- "No Dramas", meaning, "No Problem", all the time. When I asked other locals whether this term meant what I thought it to mean, I was met with blank looks. Nobody seemed to have heard of it, not even the Internet. So I put it down to yet another misheard phrase, and forgot about it.

Flash forward to 8 months later, and I pick up Bill Bryson's "Down Under" and there, right there on the third page or so, he documents its usage. By an Australian, no less.