Going for bloke

It’s on the Mail’s UK homepage, but there’s something very Australian about this story, isn’t there? And the most uniquely Australian thing about it is not the cassowary (which is also indigenous to Papua New Guinea): it’s the presence of the word “blokes” in the headline.

The word is rarely heard in any context in the US, of course, and in the UK, although it’s common, you would never see it in straight news reporting like this. In Britain, it carries a strong overtone of randomness or inconsequentiality – “some bloke”; “that bloke over there”. It’s almost dismissive; it would invite you not to care much about the people to whom the news had happened.

In Australia, however, it means something quite different: the “Aussie bloke” is a national idea, a recognised type, familiar from cultural exports such as Crocodile Dundee. As the academic Andrea Waling puts it, a bloke is “white, straight, able-bodied, and good for a laugh. He is practical and good in a crisis, but generally laid back. He rejects individualism in favour of loyalty to his mates.” In this context, “bloke” is not a denigration but an invitation to identify with the protagonists and sympathise. They are good sorts, Everymen, authentic Australians: people just like you or me, and just as likely to be out of their depth when being chased by a 100lb bird with a blue face.

Up until now, this blog has been discussing these constant collisions of anglosphere news dialects as a three-way “clash of equals” involving British, American and Australian English, but now I’m starting to suspect it’s even more complicated than that. For example, this piece of copy appeared in the Tribune subs’ queue a couple of weeks ago:

Because the story had arrived from the Australian website on its way to the UK print edition, it had already been edited, and there in blue (ie, already deleted) was the word “dairies”. Dairies? It seemed wrong, obviously, but also such an unlikely mistake to make in the context of cigarette retailing. What could the writer have meant?

In fact, a bit of Googling revealed that it wasn’t a mistake at all: this story was filed to the Australian newsroom by our correspondent in New Zealand, where the term for a corner shop/7-11/convenience store is, indeed, a “dairy”. But this usage is not even understood in Australia, so the sub in Sydney had changed it, hours before the copy found its way to London. I did one or two bits of de-Australianising elsewhere for UK readers, but beneath that work there had already been a process of de-New Zealandising that would have been undetectable to anyone outside the Tribune.

This prompts the thought that beneath the “big three” flavours of anglosphere news English, there is also an overshadowed hierarchy of others. At the Tribune, in addition to New Zealand correspondents filing to Sydney, Canadian reporters file to New York and South African writers to London. What is happening to idioms and expressions common in these countries and present in copy, but processed at regional offices elsewhere before being published to the world? Presumably, as in this case, they are ending up on the spike. We have previously floated the idea of British, Australian and American news eventually merging into one, but, if it ever happens, it may have to wait until six or seven flavours of English have been flattened into three.