Introduction by John Clarke
How’s your ebb tide?
Do you sign on the dotted lion?
Is your tea nature Orpheus Rocker?
Who is Charlie Charm Puck in ‘Waltzing Matilda’?
There was never any book about Australian speech like Strine or about posh British speech like Fraffly Well Spoken.
Here, collected in one volume, are Afferbeck Lauder’s groundbreaking studies of Australian speech, Let Stalk Strine and Nose Tone Unturned. Also included are Fraffly Well Spoken and Fraffly Suite, Lauder’s guides to the strangled dialect of the English upper class.
Reproduced with Al Terego’s original illustrations, these classic books are full of mare chick momence. They are essential reading for air fridge Strines and new Strines alike—indeed, for anyone interested in our wire flife. Tiger look and start torgon Strine!
‘A perennial source of linguistic delight. Lauder is in a class of his own.’
‘If there’s a funnier book than this, don’t read it. You’ll die laughing.’
‘Afferbeck Lauder and his illustrator, Al Terego, belong with Lennie Lower, Emile Mercier and very few others in the pantheon of Australian humorists. Whenever they’re out of print, the nation is a bleaker place. This publication has cheered me up considerably. Torque abed laugh.’
‘Ova racker lam atta blow splice lars weak end, eye animate felter rim nissen about that prefer sir ooh game up wither eyed ear of Strine. Wad African genius! Eerily cap shed the patter wah tooper fiction. Noke hidden. Yurt after Goa arfway rounder whirl to fine a funya reed.’
‘In their own right, Professor Afferbeck Lauder’s quartet of satiric masterpieces remain remarkably accurate about the way spoken Australian tends to break sequences of words up in unusual ways, miss syllables in its hurry to get to the end and come up with sounds that the rest of the world finds incomprehensible. These books…are still great fun.’