Chiara Maqueda of Zetland is impressed that Chips Mackinolty (C8) lists his home as Mparntwe – the Arrernte name for Alice Springs. “Go for it, Granny! There should be more use of Aboriginal place names by your writers!”
“Comedian Joyce Grenfell said the clue to a convincing Australian accent (C8) was to not open the mouth much and lean on something,” according to Margaret Bowman of Macquarie (ACT).
“Brian Barry (C8) should have known that calling his son Paul would not save him
from being called Paulie,” says Clive Williams of Lavender Bay. “The unwritten rule is if the name is short, lengthen it; if it’s long, shorten it. My schoolmates never called me Clivey, but I always got Willie.”
Of course, the abbreviating of names is not exclusive to Australia. Shanmugam Govindasamy of Randwick says: “Dwight Eisenhower’s mother was irked by his elder siblings’ names being shortened by their friends. So when Dwight was born, she decided to name him Dwight, confident that it couldn’t be shortened. So he became Ike.”
Continuing with our love of linguistic complaints (C8), Marcus Daniel of Bellingen asks: “Has anyone else noticed that tragedies never seem to occur in communities that aren’t ‘tight-knit’?”
