That reminds of a joke: do you know how the milk-maidens (I do’nt have a better word for it, but it refers to the young girls who in the old times were sent out with the cows to look after them and milk them in the summer season) find out who has had the most fun during weekend? They throw their panties up on the wall, and the one that sticks, shure must have been involved in lots of fun!
Sorry for the digression. Carry on.
I think that it’s because you speak the language better than we do. Even the most dumb as a sack of doorknobs person on the street in England sounds educated and refined to our ears, just through pronunciation. Y’all just talk nice.
Pie is good too, but I still dont get it. I cant picture the regular baker as a pushover.
Also, while reminiscing aussie sayings; who is Bob, and why is he my uncle? And, what is it with all the onions? When you done something right, for once, the aussies will come over and talk about onions: “Good onion mate”, you know? Help!
Clearly, you have never spoken to even a moderately dumb sack of doorknobs on the street in England. They can be damn near unintelligible.
The heck are you talking about? The English invented a language they cannot speak. Just try and watch Dr. Who without the subtitles turned on. 
You’ve got me confused with those superior upper class twits across the pond. 
My accent is this amalgamation of Canadian English, Canadian French and East European.
But I really wish I could do a good Scottish Brogue. Now that’s hot! 
I think you’ll find that’s the headteacher.
I’d just like to add a question my SO asked not long after we met.
Mig- “Why do American say “ass” after some things?”
Me- “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Mig- “You know, like “big-ass party” or “big-ass dog”. The dog doesn’t haff a big ass. What does that mean?”
I couldn’t explain, other than saying it’s just something we do.
Why is superfluous pronounced the way it is?
I didn’t realize till 6 months after moving to the US that I was mis-pronouncing it in my head whenever I read it somewhere. The weird thing is that I’ve had English language classes since the age of 11 and the word never came up.
Same for Epsicopal ?
It’s an English saying.
The most attractive theory—albeit suspiciously neat—is that it derives from a prolonged act of political nepotism. The Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury (family name Robert Cecil) appointed his rather less than popular nephew Arthur Balfour to a succession of posts.
It’s an intensifier. When you want to emphasize an adjective in a humorous way, just tack an “ass” on the end. The ass itself doesn’t mean anything.
In another age, they’d use a different word for that purpose. <queue long and rambling Grampa Simpson quote>
As for shine/shone…I’ve always felt (probably with no basis in reality or common usage at all) felt to be slightly more archaic. The only time I ever really see the word used a lot is either in astronomy or when a bad poet is forcing a rhyme.
I assume you accidentally misspelled “Episcopal,” but even so, the pronounciation is really just an artifact of its history. I mean, there’s no more reason to say, for example, “epi-SCOH-pal” than there is to say “eh-PIS-co-pal.”
Etymonline lists it as “1940s US military slang”, but doesn’t give any clues as to how it arose.
Yes, I did mean Episcopal …now I can understand that one. However, superfluous still baffles me. I mean it just rolls off the tongue so weird, like it wasn’t meant to be pronounced that way.
I haven’t heard “Good onion, mate” but I have heard “Good on ya, mate.” The latter would be the American equivalent of “Good for you!” or “Good going!”
Um, is this a whoosh?
Tikki, good on ya, mate! The “Bob’s yer uncle” thing someone else will have to explain. I always thought it was the punch line from an old music hall routine, and meant, “Oh, now I got it,” or “The penny drops,” or something like that. I think there may be a difference in British and Australian usage.
Heh, reminds me of a foreign student who asked an English speaker what the expression “having sex” meant. The anglophone explained, but the foreigner was still confused: “Why do you say it when you greet people, then?”
“What?”
“You know, ‘oh, for having sex, it’s good to see you again.’”
“Purty”, Cluricaun…Y’all talk “purty”.
I expected better out of a Schaumburgian!
-Cem
Slight hijack, but I just learned the derivation of the (mostly baseball-related) “Can of Corn” phrase.
If you’ve not heard the phrase, when an outfielder catches a nice easy pop-fly, the announcer will say “That’s a can of corn”.
It comes from that fact that cans of corn were one of themore popular canned veggies, and were stocked low on the shelves. Therefore, “easy”.
-Cem
Why so many different pronunciations of the ‘ou’ sound?:
Plough
Dough
Would
Four
Enough
Melbourne