Not long after I took my seat on the train this afternoon, the guy sitting next to me said ‘Excuse me, can you tell me what this means?’ He was holding open a copy of mX – the free ‘newspaper’ available Monday to Friday from train stations in Sydney – and pointing to the headline of an article. It said something like:

SYDNEY BUTTS OUT, BUT BUTTS GET BIGGER

Or something like that – I was pretty tired after a long day at work. I had to look at it a few times to work out what the headline meant, so I felt a bit sorry for the guy who asked me, because he’d had no chance of working it out by himself.

The confusion is obviously the use of butt, which is actually quite a common and useful word to know. The problem is that it has quite a few uses (not limited to these):

1. Cigarette Butt: The end of a cigarette, generally the filter, which some stupid people still throw on the ground.
2. Butt: Another word for bottom, rear, rectum, bum, derrière, etc. Famously used by Sir Mix-A-Lot in the song Baby Got Back.
3. to butt heads with someone: when you’re having a disagreement with someone. For example, if I was talking to someone who believed that it was a good idea to execute criminals who commit certain crimes, I could say that ‘We butted heads on the issue of capital punishment.’
4. to butt out: when you tell someone to butt out, you’re basically telling them to mind their own business. If I was having an argument with my girl friend, for example, and my mum started taking my girl friend’s side in the argument, I would probably tell my mum to ‘butt out and let us handle it’.

So which ones of these was the headline using? At first glance I thought they were using (4) and (2), but really it was (1) and (2). As far as I could tell, the story was basically saying that the amount of smokers in Sydney had gone done (they had put their cigarette BUTTS OUT for the last time) but that people had gotten fatter (their BUTTS were BIGGER).

Newspaper headlines can be cryptic like this sometimes, especially for a non-native speaker. Personally, the style annoys me a little, especially when the person writing the headline is trying to be funny, witty, or make a pun (a play on words). My main problem is that often, in an attempt to be clever, the writer makes a headline which doesn’t really reflect what the article is about.

I don’t know if this was the case with the mX article, because I didn’t bother reading the whole thing after I’d translated the heading for my fellow passenger.

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These days, as part of my work, I read a lot of essays written by people from a non-English speaking background. Some of it’s very good, some of it’s very bad, most of it’s plain average to tell you the truth.

Sometimes it can be entertaining. Spelling mistakes can always be a source of humour. For example if someone writes goblinisation instead of globalisation that always makes me chuckle. Once someone wrote In China, from ancient until now, many Chinese have been influenced by Confusion ideas and I smiled for days.

Probably the most common spelling mistake I come across is people writing quite instead of quiet, or vice versa. It’s a very understandable mistake – all it involves is switching the last two letters of the word around. But as far as spelling errors go, it’s actually quite annoying.

The main problem is that they are totally different words used in completely different ways. So when one is used instead of the other, the affect on how we read the sentence is quiet significant. As you can see from that example, the sentence now makes no sense whatsoever. When I’m reading an essay, this in not a good sign.

Of course, quiet is an adjective and is the opposite of loud. That’s pretty much all it means. Quite is another story entirely. It’s an adverb, is extremely common, and is used to grade adjectives. There can be variations in the meaning, depending on the context.

In formal British English, it can mean completely:

That opera was quite amazing = That opera was completely amazing.

In the negative quite is commonly used to mean not exactly:

That’s not quite what I meant = That’s not exactly what I meant.

The word is can also be used to imply that something is good, but it’s not the best, or it could be better:

That hamburger was quite nice = I liked the hamburger but it wasn’t the best one I’ve ever had.

This is probably the most common use of quite. Australians, particularly, use quite as part of their idiom when praising something or giving someone a compliment. In Australian English, quite can be used as a synonym for very. If I went and picked up my girlfriend on Friday night and she was wearing a new dress, I might say:

That’s quite a nice dress, is it new?

Why do Australians do this? My theory is that we know it’s important to give people praise people, but we don’t want people’s egos to get too big when we give them compliments. But please don’t tell my girlfriend that, though, or I’ll get in quite a lot of trouble the next time I say it.

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In terms of vocabulary, different learners focus on different things. Some learners focus on translating words directly from their native language. Other learners enjoy learning slang. Some learners even think that the more complicated a word is, the better it is!

Personally, I’m a big fan of phrasal verbs. Not only are they extremely common and useful, they’re also relatively easy to learn. There are thousands of them though, so you won’t be able to learn them all at once – sorry.

Basically, phrasal verbs are verbs that combine with adverbs or prepositions. Here’s a sentence with two phrasal verbs in it:

The monkey picked up the banana and put it in his mouth.

Different phrasal verbs have different rules. Some of them are flexible (like someone who has been doing yoga for a long time) and others are very inflexible (like me – I can’t touch my toes!).

The first phrasal verb in our example, picked up, is flexible. We can change the position of the banana (the object) and keep the same meaning:

The monkey picked the banana up and put it in his mouth.

But the second phrasal verb is very inflexible. The word it must stay exactly where it is. We can’t say:

The monkey picked the banana up and put in it his mouth.

Now the sentence says that the monkey put his mouth inside the banana. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

Another interesting thing about phrasal verbs is that they not only extend the meaning of the verb, like in our monkey example, they can also change the verb’s meaning! For example, when I was growing up my mother used to say to me:

“Don’t forget to pick up your little brother after school.”

She said that to me every single day. I don’t know why – maybe she thought I had a bad memory. But I didn’t pick up my little brother in the same way the monkey picked up the banana, did I? I could have, but my little brother was fat from eating too many Mars Bars and he was too heavy for me to actually pick up.

If you’re interested in exploring phrasal verbs more, you could get a phrasal verbs dictionary, or check out websites like this one which specialise in phrasal verbs. If there’s a phrasal verb you’re having trouble with, leave a comment or email me and I’ll do my best to explain it.

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How’s it going? is an extremely common Australian saying. I use it at least half-a-dozen times a day, whenever I’m meeting someone for the first time. This is when the saying is most commonly used. If my phone rings and I look at it and see that it’s my friend Chris who is calling, I’ll pick up the phone and say:

G’day Chris, how’s it going?

Which actually sounds more like:

Gidday Chris, owzitgoen?

How’s it going? is one of those sayings which is really important in starting conversations, like ca va in France, alright in England or genki in Japan. The it in the middle probably refers to life; there’s another Australian greeting which goes How’s life treating you? (Howz life treatin’ ya?) which basically means the same thing.

It’s similar to when people ask how are you?. When someone says how’s it going?, they don’t want to hear your life story, they might not even care how you are. The saying is automatic, like a reflex or a ritual, and the reply should be the same. There are many different ways to answer, and most Australians will have their personal preference. Some of the most standard replies are:

Not bad
Alright
Pretty good
Can’t complain
Good

And each of these might have mate or yeah attached to either the beginning or the end. So the beginning of my conversation with Chris might sound like this:

Me: G’day Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: Yeah, not bad, mate.

And now that Chris and I have completed the conversation ritual, we’re ready to actually start talking to each other. Chris lives in Perth at the moment, so we usually have a lot of catching up to do.

But sometimes Chris might be feeling really good, or really bad. In these situations he might want to break the ritual and tell me person exactly how he feels, and why. The purpose of his call might be to tell me about how he feels. This is where the word actually is very useful:

Me: G’day Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: Actually… not so good.
Me: Really? What’s up? (What’s wrong?)

Or:

Chris: Actually… pretty good.
Me: Oh yeah? How come? (Why?)

For English learners in Australia, understanding how the locals talk can be one of the most difficult things. The best advice is to try using Australian slang yourself. So get down to the pub, buy a VB, and try out your best Australian accent!

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