strictly speaking the song was called "I'm gonna be" but everyone knows it as "500 miles" https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/proclaimers/imgonnabe500miles.html
My friends and I looked it up a hundred years ago because of the song, and I've used it ever since. Good word. It's even in my WIP as a dialog tag.
Yes, I am aware. I consume great quantities of Aussie TV. I became addicted when I was stationed in Berlin and we had access to the SSVC, the UK's equivalent to AFRTS, and I got to watch Neighbors and Home & Away, circa early 90's. How could they just replace Pippa like that?! ETA: My current drug of choice is A Place to Call Home. Unapologetically trashy prime-time soap action with scads and scads of lads missing shirts.
I remember my sister-in-law's confusion when she first listened to Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" and its reference to the "navvies who worked upon the railway." We learned that the term came from the "navigation workers" who dug the canals in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, and who later were hired by the railroads to lay track in England and, later on, in Canada. Now we have an entire generation who are told that the "navvies" were ten-foot-high blue people from Pandora. I see more confusion on the horizon.
I work in an industrial trade in Canada, most people call them tin snips, though some older guys might call them sheet metal, shim or more rarely aviation shears. I would say in Canada holiday and vacation are distinct things. Going on holiday just means taking time off work, even if you just stay at home, where vacation is actively going somewhere. "What'd ya do on your holiday?" "Took a vacation down to Michigan."
