Why your chippy has a 'toolbox' and bullet trains 'fang it'
Tools, fangs, roots, pubs – the mailbag had a distinct ocker slant in May. William Ryan, a former publican, and keen word-watcher, wrote, 'I'd never heard 'toolbox' as an information-sharing session until my son became an apprentice chippy. They now have a toolbox every morning. What's going on?'
Building sites seem the idea's bedrock. Picture a gang of scaffolders and crane operators, brickies and sparkies, gathered around toolboxes real or figurative. Safety as focus, the toolbox talk reviews best practice, outlines protocols. But when did the term emerge?
Earlier mentions seem American, cited in the realm of occupational health and safety. If not construction, then aviation is another suspect, with a 1971 dossier referring to a tarmac chat among aircrew.
Since then, the toolbox ethos has been spread by tradies to oil-and-gas projects, mines to real-estate offices, even my weekly bike rides. Mick is the culprit, an engineering mate with a background in chocolate factories. Every Saturday, after a pedal, he turns our kaffeeklatsch into a MAMIL toolbox, citing any risky behaviour he'd noted, from poor signals to reckless speed. We pretend to listen like a band of Oompa Loompas.
Keeping with speed, fang was the next word to investigate, the query sparked by Stephen McDonell, BBC's China correspondent based in Beijing. His Bluesky post captured the breakneck hurtle of a bullet train, a beige blur of farmland beyond the window. His caption read, 'Fang'n it now at 350kmh as we approach #Shanghai'. Tellingly, McDonell spent time on these shores working with the BBC since fanging (or more commonly, fangin') belongs to our unique vernacular, linked to Argentina's Formula 1 champ Juan Fangio. Dubbed El Maestro, Fangio bagged 24 career wins across the 1950s, bequeathing his name to local hoons and billycart kids.
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Still on homegrown slang, my recent column on the roots of root caused a ruckus in the forums. Riddley Walker reminded me that the late essayist Kate Jennings edited a poetry anthology with Outback Press in 1975: Mother I'm Rooted. As Riddley added, 'The title carried both meanings – sexual and physical exhaustion.'
Another reader recalled that when his 'dear old Dad was fatigued, he used to say that he felt like one of the Tedd brothers: Roo'. Just as a third respondent couldn't resist a joke: 'The outback grazier was telling his fellow cockie that he was thinking of driving down to Sydney to the Royal Easter Show. Asked which route he'd take, he replied, 'Well, I thought I'd take the missus – she stuck with me through the drought.'
Such front-bar humour segues into the final challenge, this one posed by Sian Johnson: 'Can we do better than 'pub test' to mean a citizen's measure of acceptability? I feel the phrase is too blokey, too boozy.' Sian might be right, though pub test seems entrenched.
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