{"id":226,"date":"2009-02-21T00:46:54","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T00:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/02\/21\/on_cultural_differences\/"},"modified":"2009-02-21T00:46:54","modified_gmt":"2009-02-21T00:46:54","slug":"on_cultural_differences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/02\/21\/on_cultural_differences\/","title":{"rendered":"On cultural differences"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s still Friday<\/a> somewhere in the world.<\/p>\n

\nI was taken back to my school days in the lab last week. We have a visiting post-doc, originally Geordie but attenuated by years of living in Leeds. He referred to someone as a spacker<\/a>, which, along with terms such as ‘spaz’ and ‘div’, you probably really had to grow up with to appreciate. ‘Spacker’ is probably more offensive than ‘spaz’ — one of my teachers used to call us that when we were being particularly stupid (or ten years old: sometimes difficult to tell the difference) and when we called him on it he claimed it was short for ‘spasmodic’. <\/p>\n

\nI thought no more of it, until I saw that Kate had bought this:<\/p>\n

\n\"spakfiller\"<\/p>\n

\nwhereupon I had a silent fit of giggles. <\/p>\n

\nHere, the equivalent but reasonably non-offensive term (unless you’re from Newcastle<\/a>) is Bogan<\/a>. Jenny tells me that in the US, Polyfilla<\/a> is generically called spackle<\/a> (although wikipedia fails to mention that Polyfilla is cellulose-based and hence superior<\/a> to the original spackle-based Spackle, which is now also<\/em> cellulose-based and therefore the same. Or something).<\/p>\n

\nThe other thing that Australians do different is cheese<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\"tasty<\/a><\/p>\n

\nI can’t bring myself to say<\/a> it, let alone buy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s still Friday somewhere in the world. I was taken back to my school days in the lab last week. We have a visiting post-doc, originally Geordie but attenuated by years of living in Leeds. He referred to someone as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}