Employers that throw around the phrase “going above and beyond” should be banned from running a business. It’s exploitative, because the actual translation for that is: “I want you to do work that isn’t your job and isn’t in your job description without paying you for it. Give me free labor.”
Throwback to the time my poor German teacher had to explain the concept of formal and informal pronouns to a class full of Australians and everyone was scandalised and loudly complained “why can’t I treat everyone the same?” “I don’t want to be a Sie!” “but being friendly is respectful!” “wouldn’t using ‘du’ just show I like them?” until one guy conceded “I suppose maybe I’d use Sie with someone like the prime minister, if he weren’t such a cunt” and my teacher ended up with her head in her hands saying “you are all banned from using du until I can trust you”
God help Japanese teachers in Australia.
if this isnt an accurate representation of australia idk what is
Australia’s reverse-formality respect culture is fascinating. We don’t even really think about it until we try to communicate or learn about another culture and the rules that are pretty standard for most of the world just feel so wrong. I went to America this one time and I kept automatically thinking that strangers using ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ were sassing me.
Australians could not be trusted with a language with ingrained tiers of formal address. The most formal forms would immediately become synonyms for ‘go fuck yourself’ and if you weren’t using the most informal version possible within three sentences of meeting someone they’d take it to mean you hated them.
100% true.
the difference between “‘scuse me” and “excuse me” is a fistfight
See also: the Australian habit of insulting people by way of showing affection, which other English-speakers also do, but not in a context where deescalating the spoken invective actively increases the degree of offence intended, particularly if you’ve just been affectionately-insulting with someone else.
By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.
Also note that different modifiers radically change the meaning of particular insults. Case in point: calling someone a fuckin’ cunt is a deadly insult, calling someone a mad cunt is a compliment, and calling someone a fuckin’ mad cunt means you’re literally in awe of them. Because STRAYA.
case in point: the ‘Howard DJs like a mad cunt’ meme.
1. I work for the Australian National Audit Office as a federal performance analyst and literally everyone in the office refers to each other by their first name. Even the Auditor-General gets called by his first name, and he’s an independent officer of the Parliament, appointed by the
Governor-General on the recommendation of the Joint Committee of Public
Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) and the Prime Minister.
2. This is like the fourth time I’ve reblogged this due to additional A+ commentary.
This is wild, haha!
I can confirm this is 100 percent accurate. you can gauge exactly how pissed my store manager is at a customer by how many times she calls a customer Ma’am in a sentence. The more polite she is, the more you know she’s absolutely fucking fuming.
white person: *eats chicken tikka masala once* i just…. i feel so connected… to indian culture …. I’m learning to speak islam…. check out my third eye….. chakra
Every time I see this. Every damn time. I’m immediately sucked back into my fuckin. Fuckin English lit class with Mr. Fuckass McShit. Mr. “Hit the gong to begin class”, “Namaste, Children”, “I wanna go backpacking in India to find my spiritual awakening and also my left burkinstock that I lost during a cedar sauna drum circle” ass bastard.
“Do you want to share your poetry with the class to get in touch with your emotions” ass fucker. Mr. “Here’s a photograph of a tribal shaman, describe him using nature words” asshole. Pretentious-ass, condescending motherfucker.
“Do you want to tell us about your saddest memory?”
“I dunno, sir. Are you giving me an option?”
“No.”
“Then why are you asking”
Every goddamn day. Fuck. “You seem tense.” Oh, I seem tense? I seem tense. Well fuck, Professor Pillsbury, maybe I ‘seem tense’ because I walk into a room on five hours of sleep to the sound of a goddamn brass gong drilling through my brain and your seven-foot-nine, socks-and-sandals-wearing, patchouli-smelling ass immediately gravitates in my direction with some shit like “a tree……… Is a Poem” and I gotta sit here and politely tell you that No I’m Not Comfortable Telling The Class About A Time I Was Emotionally Vulnerable With A Loved One using words that sound like the way the color yellow smells. Maybe I don’t wanna sit in a circle and hold hands with Brittney from Computer Sciences to “align our auras” or some shit. Fuck. Fuuuuuuck.
I swear to God, if I wanted to sing ‘kumbaya’ with a smelly old guy with gross facial hair who writes bad porn on the side, I’d go out to the parking lot and share a Hookah with Crazy Dan, the disgraced electrician.
What, I don’t wanna do an interpretive dance to represent the spiritual experience of eating Quinoa in a room full of ambivalent preteens and suddenly I’m the ‘troubled youth’ you need to Robin Williams “O Captain My Captain” your way into having a Paternal Bonding Moment powerful enough to Expand My Impressionable Young Mind and Turn My Life Around, you goddamn saint, you? Jesus Fucking Christ. You insufferable jackass. You’re not “Enlightened”, you rolled out of bed and ate half a pot brownie, wrote a sad song about a leaf, and strolled into class to ramble about your Spirit Animal for six hours straight before calling it a day. Holy Jesus goddamned Christ. Fucking Balls, sir. Holy Fucking Balls
Okay but I wanna know what Crazy Dan did to become a disgraced electrician
One third of GoFundMe campaigns are for necessary medical expenses. People are “donating” their vacation days so that a new mom can stay home with her baby. A college-educated homeless man stood on the street handing out resumes in desperation, begging for a job, any job. Multiple posts about parents buying teachers necessities like a car and school supplies went viral.
Twitter and the media highlight these stories as heartwarming examples of “sacrifice” and people “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.”
I call bullshit. Only in a dystopian society would we feel anything other than horrified at the thought of people crowdfunding their most basic needs.
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