It's All Cricket to Me

Listen carefully, and you can hear 300 years of history diverging. Australian English and American English are daughter dialects of the British Isles, separated in their youth. Now they almost mutually unintelligible. Almost? Like a good Socio-linguist, let me put a number around that. Our book-loving host provided me with a book of Aussie slang, about 300 terms. A quick study, and 100 of them were identical to American expressions. 2/3rds were not. So there you have it: in another century or so, Americans and Australians may not understand each other at all.
In some areas, incomprehensibility is already complete. The game of cricket itself is opaque to me, as are the headlines it yields. "Mother of all scalps takes the biscuit." "Pup and wagging tail lift hosts."
My favorite headline is from the game of politics: "Howard to get highest US civil gong from Bush." You can guess that gong means a medal. Dare I date myself by saying that I wish Bush had been given the Gong Show gong long, long ago? Bush called Howard a Man of Steel, the Australian paper calls him The Man of Steal, for usurping space in Blair House and forcing the Obamas into a hotel.
My pet theory about Australian English is that among urban teenagers, it is diverging from the sort of standardization referred to as Broadcast English. The oddest thing is that my accent is taken as Canadian!