Nothing beats that eye contact with the butcher, some time late December: 'I want beef, big and on the bone. What you got, twinkle?'
I don`t know about dandelion and burdock, but dandelion make`s a really good tea. Burdock was all over the farm I grew up on, and they get stuck to everything from clothes to the animals. Burdock root makes a tea to, (no idea what burdock and dandelion is tbh) but I hold such spite for that plant I could never consume it. Wipe it all out. Burn it I say, burn it out.
*butcher comes out onto shop floor and promptly punches matwoolf in the face. Matwoolf looks up at the butcher, blood streaming down his face and says "I didn't mean that kind of beef!" The butcher replies "I know. That was for calling me twinkle!"*
Holy cripes! Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the person who doesn't like bacon! Is there a large reward? There should be a large reward. At least a Nobel Prize in, oh, I don't know, WTFness or something. Imagine. Someone who doesn't like bacon. It shatters the zeitgeist and replaces it with the woolloomooloo. Then it scrambles the woolloomooloo and replaces it with the loomooloowool. Whatever - some kind of wool is involved. And at least one loo.
I believe at least one of those is a small town somewhere in Australia. @Oscar Leigh, can you confirm?
It is. I've been there. It's a suburb of Sydney. I'm using it in the sense of "silly word with lots of o's that I like the sound of. Also, there's a University of Woolloomooloo, where the Bruces teach in the philosophy department." (Monty Python reference - sorry to those of you who are too young to be familiar with the Comedy Gods.)
Well, how my day is going so far I am thinking takeout... but I can almost guarantee that when I order my pizza, they will call me up 2 hours later and tell me that I have run out of dough or that their oven broke down.
If you make a funny sounding name with a bunch of "a"s or "o"s it's probably an Aboriginal word from one tribe or another that's been used for something here. Where do you think we got Wollongong, Billabong and Kangaroo from? Imagine how wacked they sounded the first few times!
I actually felt very comfortable with the place names in Australia, the US Midwest has lots of Native American names that are somewhat similar. Winnemucca, Kickapoo, Algonquin, Kankakee, Menimonee. Different sounds to Australian Aboriginal ones, but clearly not European. Fun Fact: Chicago is an English bastardization of a French bastardization of a Native American word for "place of the stinking wild onion."
New Zealand has to take the cake with some of their Maori place names, though. My favourite is Waikikamukau. Check the link for how to pronounce that one and you'll understand why. The longest place name: also happens to be a one horse town.
