Bum nuts and chickens in pyjamas: the words Australians use for food | Amanda Laugesen | The Guardian

Do you like to go out for a halal snack pack? Do you enjoy your sausage sizzle at Bunnings? Or perhaps you prefer to indulge in eating a snot block or a slice of pav? The Australian English lexicon is full of food words and as chief editor of The Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins, it’s my job to collect them and put them in the dictionary.

The dictionary (first edition 1988, second edition 2016) records the words that are unique to Australia, are first used here, or have special significance in Australia. Our team researches the origins of the word and tells its story, in the style of the Oxford English Dictionary, through a collection of quotations. The dictionary – which will be launched online later in 2023 – is a record of Australia’s past and present captured in the words we use.
[A] feature of the Australian English lexicon is our tendency to abbreviate words and add an ‘o’ or ‘ie/y’ ending to them

Every year we put out an appeal for words related to a particular theme and last year we collected food words . While we had plenty of food words already in the dictionary, we were certain that there were more out there. And sure enough we received from the public many colourful and fun terms to add to our database, affirming that Australians can be pretty creative when it comes to talking about their food.

One of the terms we had already collected – but not yet put into the dictionary – was “bum nut” for an egg. We have “goog” in the dictionary (first recorded in 1919) but “bum nut” is looking like a potential contender to be added – so far we have managed to record it back to 1986. Our appeal confirmed Australians’ familiarity with the term, along with a few lesser-known variations on the theme such as “butt nugget”, “fart cartridge” and “pre-nugget”.

Slang terms abound in our vocabulary and food has not been spared the kind of humour whereby some of us call a vanilla slice a “snot block” and a pie a “rat coffin” or “maggot bag”. The appeal gave us some new ones: “dandruff cake” for lamington, “bachelor’s breakfast” for meat pie, “dead fly pie” and “blowfly slice” for a fruit mince pie and “fart fodder” for baked beans.

Rhyming slang, a renowned feature of Australian English and an important subset of slang, also featured prominently in the contributions we received. While we were already familiar with terms like “dog’s eye” (meat pie) and “dead horse” (sauce), new rhyming slang contributions included “black horse” for Worcestershire sauce, “Harold Holt” for salt, “Greg Chappell” for apple, “dad and mum” for rum, and “dark and nasty” for pasty. Plays on pronunciation also featured, such as “horse’s doover” for hors d’oeuvre, “chicken in pyjamas” for chicken parmigiana and “sparrow’s guts” for asparagus.

Yet another feature of the Australian English lexicon is our tendency to abbreviate words and add an “o” or “ie/y” ending to them. One of our notable contributions on this front was “scrambo” for scrambled eggs. Regional terms are an example of where we see these endings and abbreviations used – such as parma v parmie v parmo. While we weren’t alerted to any new variants of these regional debates – in which much emotional energy is invested – I was reminded of how much people expect a lexicographer to settle the debate once and for all. (The answer from a historical lexicographer is, of course, that all forms are equally legitimate, as long as there is real evidence that they exist.)

Other contributions to our appeal included “bush doughnut” for a type of doughnut made while camping, “poor man’s pizza” for a slice of toast with tomato sauce put into the sandwich maker and “tucker trap” for a restaurant.
How many of these words that we’ve collected will make it into the dictionary? All the contributions we receive are recorded in our database and then we do the hard work of researching them to determine whether they are, in fact, Australian and whether we can find good evidence of their usage. If we find that a word is indeed Australian and we have evidence of its use across a period of time, it can make it into the dictionary.