Crikey

A woman says "fair dinkum" on a plane and causes a minor brouhaha (it seems there must be a bit more to it than that, but that's all the smh.com.au is giving me).

Reto is carrying on the Nevil Shute-athon that has swept our flat lately by reading On The Beach (which I got for him for his birthday. Being a cheapskate I tried first to find it in the local second hand bookshop but to no avail, and then to my surprise I found it at the english-language Orell Füssli (bookshop) in Zürich, and to my further surprise it only cost 13.80. Which seems cheap to me. So then I was looking around at the price of other things, and I found Shantaram (and by the way did you know it's being made into a movie starring the hot-or-not Johnny Depp?) for about 20 francs, as compared to the Dymocks price of $35. Hmm) and he (Reto, not Johnny Depp, in case all that parenthetical stuff was too long and distracting) occasionally asks me to translate things from Strine to normal english for him. Yesterday he asked me what "dinkum" means, which I suppose is possibly confusing (not having "fair" attached to it), but as it turns out he didn't really know about "fair dinkum" either.

Sadly now it is probably not long until he incorporates it into everyday language. He has started saying "fair cow" at least a few times a day. Which is funny, because he is hopelessly bad at using german slang (apparently).