EPISTEMOLOGY IN STRINE.

From Desbladet, these thoughtful lyrics from Down Under:

Maybe I’m knotty veneer
Hagger nigh telephime reely reel?
Hadder Y. Noah Fimere?
… Wunker nawlwye stell; yegger nawlwye snow
If you’re reelor yerony dreaming;
Yellopoff the topoff your nirra stow
A new wafer the sander the screaming.

–Afferbeck Lauder

Alistair Morrison coined the term “Strine” for the idiosyncratic form of English spoken in Australia; his 1965 book Let Stalk Strine, written under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder (“alphabetical order”), popularized the term. If anyone can’t figure out the text of the ditty, say so in the comments and I’ll translate.

Comments

  1. Cors, Strayan has change dabbit sins then.

  2. Sounds like a good book. Emma Chiset?

  3. Well, this is the best I found at bookfinder.com:

    Ambrosia Books
    via Books & Collectibles [Australia]
    Publisher: Ure Smith Sydney 1969 Reprint Card PB, sm 8vo, pp 46, b/w line drawings, gen wear and stains but sound copy of scarce book. 100 gms $7.17

    Most copies are over $20, so act now!

  4. A couple of decades later, the combined edition Strine: Let Stalk Strine and Nose Tone Unturned is a mere US$ 9.95 at AbeBooks.

  5. Or $0.00 to borrow from Open Library

  6. @Hans [From the ‘Paddingly Socratic’ thread] I post my request to the helpdesk here – the “Recently commented” function seems to be broken

    I wouldn’t say “broken”, but definitely odd. There’s this post titled “EPISTEMOLOGY IN STRINE’, in which that last word is a html link. The ‘STRINE’ word doesn’t appear in the ‘Recently commented’; everything after this in the list seems to be bogus (and only includes upper-case titles).

    (I guess reporting it on this thread is quite likely to make something worse. Or not.)

  7. I don’t know why I put an HTML link in the title anyway — what a foolish thing to do! I’ve removed it now; let’s see if that helps matters.

  8. let’s see if that helps matters.

    Hmm not a lot (as at even date). I’m recording this before shutting down for the night/and for @JC’s benefit? Perhaps the effects I’m seeing now are leftovers in the cache; rebooting tomorrow will dispel them. (See under straws, clutching at.)

    Although you’ve removed the HTML, this topic is still showing in the ‘Recently commented’ as ‘EPISTEMOLOGY IN’. Furthermore when displaying the list, there’s a significant delay after that title and before any other titles show.

    It continues to be the case that posts appearing after this one in the list are bogus: the immediately below [**] ‘YEATS ON RHYTHM’s last comment is 2003. So anything with comments from 2003 up to February 29 has gone from the list.

    [**] Of course by posting this comment, the list’ll be rejiggered; but still there’ll be nothing after 2003 up to Feb 29. Perhaps the HTML is a red herring and this is a Feb 24 -> leapday problem?

    (We might also find the Random Link feature is banjaxed.)

  9. David Marjanović says

    Interesting idea that it’s a leap-day problem.

  10. Trond Engen says

    I had the same thought.

    Yesterday the new client database at work had stopped working, and we joked that it was a leap-day problem, forcing everyone to reenter everything they had done since implementation.

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