Any Aussies Here?

i'm watching an oz sitcom, and one of the chars keeps calling the others "cobras". a bit of googling, i see there's a DATED expression "cobber" which means mate or pal. but all sorts of comments say it hasn't been used in like 50 years.

so...does its use sound off? or like trying to make the speaker look intentionally unhip?

and is he further unhip by mispronouncing it "cobra", or is that just me mishearing? or has it, in fact, MUTATED to this in recent years?

subs consistently render it my way: "G'day, cobras!"

 

Cobber is still in fairly common use by old codgers or middle aged to old people that live out in the sticks (in a rural area in the middle of nowhere). Some of my relatives live on the outskirts of Bendigo and Mildura and they might say "I'm going down the pub to see me cobber" A cobber is a good friend, someone you hang out with and do things to help each other.

Another similar sounding slang word is cobblers which is much the same as the pommie word bollocks. Cobblers means rubbish.

Haven't heard cobras used as slang and I've lived in Australia all my life and travelled all around the country.

 

the one using it is about 25, and is a hard-drinking law student at UMelbourne. so i don't know what that says about melbourne....

"cobblers" and "bollocks" i know from benny hill. unlike some other brit expressions ("shagged", "sacked", "lift"), these two have completely failed to take root in the US. anyone like myself who recognizes either, surely does so entirely care of sir benjamin.

 

PS: "sticks" is quite common in the US.

Sticks Nix Hick Pix - Wikipedia

 

I too come from Melbourne......... and my father, grandfather and my uncle used cobber a lot when I was a young boy growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s but by the 2000s it was only used for very old friends although my uncle from up the country still uses it to this day.....but he is 92yo and I guess old habits stick around lol

Another one is "ya china plate" means your mate or your friend. This rhyming slang was more prevalent in the wartime era in the 1940s and came over when a lot of British servicemen emigrated to Australia after World War II.

 

china (plate) i learned from OFAH!

 

hey, wikipedia says cobber is also oz for "hard caramel coated in chocolate".

is THIS usage still current?

would it be extended to name-brand candy bars, twix or heath, say? would ppl call them cobbers?

 

Cobbers were bitesize cubes of chewy caramel coated in chocolate and they are similar in size to choc coated aniseed rings and cobbers were always known as cobbers and were never candy bars. In the olden days when I was small you bought them individually from a jar on the counter. They were two for a penny or five for twopence or eight for threepence and then we changed to decimal currency in 1966 and they suddenly became two cents each which I thought was a bit rude.

Yeah cobbers were popular when I was a kid but along with going to the corner shop to buy a small bag of mixed lollies with your pocket money things changed by the late 1970s and through the 1980s when we started having a proliferation of convenience stores and everything there is prepackaged. Once 7-Eleven or similar franchises became entrenched in almost every petrol station in Australia, the little corner stores all closed because they couldn't compete with the franchise's buying power and then the convenience stores lobbied for changes to the law so that the corner store was no longer the only place to buy milk other than a supermarket. In Australia the old corner stores were always called either milk bars in some states and in other states were called delis but if I talk about milk bars then our american friends will think it is a shake shop selling milk shakes or smoothies or similar.

You can still get cobbers at a handful of specialty lolly shops but they aren't generally available at the convenience stores and even the specialty lolly stores are often out of stock. They are made by Allens Sweets who are now owned by Nestlé.
If you want to try some then try here....when they are back in stock
https://www.theprofessors.com.au/products/allens-cobbers-320s-1-8kg-in-a-display.html

 

"but if I talk about milk bars then our american friends will think it is a shake shop selling milk shakes or smoothies or similar."

au contraire! the only image for "milk bar" an american would come up with is:

latest (710×425) (nocookie.net)

 

The link is not working for me

 

take 2:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/a...va5_(1).jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160219031858

 

movie aside, i always thought "milk bar" was britlish for a candy bar! hershey's or w/e.

not any sort of shop or establishment.

wasn't there some "milky bar kid"? that's too close to ignore!

 

Yep, Milky Bars were a kids white chocolate bar and the ad campaign had the Milky Bar Kid saying the Milky Bars are on me....
Here is one from the 1980s I think.
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article12619532.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/OLIVER-WILLMENT-COSTER-WHO-DROVE-HIS-DADS-CAR-INTO-A-POLICE-VAN-BOURNEMOUTH-BRITAIN-DEC-2005.jpg

and the original Milky Bar Kid
https://www.novafm.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/milky-Bar-Kid.jpg

This link still brings up a black screen with a small white rectangle in the middle.
What is the pic supposed to be?

 

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/a-clockwork-orange/images/9/9c/Korova5_(1).jpg
Just enjoying a bit of milk before a night of ultraviolence.

 

so what was wrong with my first 2 links?

and how do u get one to "embed", like joffa did with MB kid?

 

Both your links just show a white rectangle on a black screen which opens in a new tab.

I use the image button and then I paste the URL or location of the image into the box and voila.....The image button is next to the smiley face button on the post or reply box tool ribbon
A bonus tip for free, if you want to embed a video into a post then use the media button to the right of the image button

 

@K Faraday I think this is what you meant to post and I got it from the link in Just Playin's post
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/a-clockwork-orange/images/9/9c/Korova5_%281%29.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160219031858

 

yeah, that question was obviously directed at just playin' -- i know YOU can't see them, but since s/he apparently *can*, i'm asking her/him what's inherently diff among the three.

but tx for the embed lesson! i much prefer doing that, but somehow totally missed all those buttons up there...as well as "upload a file" and "more options" down the bottom....

 

I deleted the extraneous parts of the URL.

 

As I was telling Goddess, I've had issues with being stalked by a guy in Australia called James Berich.

He has been flooding an anxiety forum with vile comments. Over and over again. Now he has resorted to saying he hopes my mother dies, etc.

I really don't think this guy realizes how stupid he looks by doing this. This is basically because he knew me from forums...

IN 2004!

Yeah. Try to comprehend that, if you can...

 

Can you link us to this forum which includes the vial comments?

 

Yeah.

It is this one, here.

https://anxietyforum.net/forum/search.php?searchid=3116670

 

You are derailing the thread...

 

Sorry.

 

that's an understatement!

and with a dead link to boot....

CROIKEY!

 

The link is working.

 

Try this one.

https://anxietyforum.net/forum/forum.php

Or this one.

http://anxietyforum.net/forum/search.php?searchid=3116699

 

nope and nope!

 

How come they aren't working?

 

they're "working" but what are they? one's to the forum's homepage; one's a search on some nonexistent ID.

thought you'd be linking straight to w/e it was u wanted to show us. not "here's the forum, now go find it on your own..."

 

I didn't know the links were acting up. Just go to the index page. You will see the guy's spam.

 

pass. already wasted enuf time checking those 4 links.

 

It's just full of some Aussie arsehole's crap...

 

Yeh, your a keeper!
A lost soul who cant even make it on Tik Tok.
Have to spread your disease here!

 

I don't even use TikTok.

 

not oz, but nz movie "the quiet earth" has the line "i've been gay by the volume
of my own corruption!" when lead is rambling about how he destroyed the earth.

even assuming gay means "happy" there, i still can't quite parse the sentence! "i'm impressed with just how corrupt i am"?