ABSTRACT
To consider slang is of course to descend into the lower depths of the language and culture. Where the ‘low’ speakers are audible. To go linguistically downwards, down under, and indeed Down Under, to where ordinary Australian English is spoken — the lingo celebrated by Eric Partridge, in his long 1953 essay ‘Australian English’, for its ‘healthy, only very rarely lawless, contempt for the social strata of language’; its ‘unconventionality: freedom, or the desire of freedom, from restraint’; its ‘low-browism’; its ‘marked’, even ‘excessive’, ‘dependence upon and use of slang in speech and even in writing’; its facility in and lack of self-consciousness about ‘the coining and using of new metaphors or of “outlandish” speech’ (Partridge 1960: 116, 117, 124, 125). Not Pomspeak then, the language that Barry McKenzie — Aussie hero of Barry Humphries and Nicholas Garland's legendary Private Eye strip-cartoon about this bloke from Down Under chundering his freespoken way around London's Earls Court — travelled thousands of miles to challenge by way of glorious linguistic foulness (so foul that even Private Eye eventually felt compelled to pull the plug on it; see Humphries and Garland 1988). An uninhibited foulness cheered on in linguistically self-conscious Aussie literature such as Kaz Cooke's joyously bad-mouthing novel The Crocodile Club (1997).
