Language lost from history

I have said many times in this column that history is about more than dates, and here is an example.
I started to make a list of words and expressions from my childhood days that I no longer hear around the traps, and the whole thing blew out of all proportion. After a few days I had just shy of 400 things we once said, or the adults around us said, that we don't use now. We could probably make up together a much longer list of words that we use now but did not use back in the day.
Of course, my language was enriched by living on a dairy farm at Longwarry in those years, with a father who had a fair turn of phrase, as cow cockies did, and who also had cows that stood on feet, stepped into milk buckets and swished unsavoury tails around the milker's face. Dad never reasoned with them, never explained why their behaviour made him sad and never arranged counselling for them. He didn't do that with us, either. Right and wrong were as clear to us as they were to the cows.
In the day, blasphemy was not at all rare. This was a time when a cow might stand on your foot, or tip over a bucket of milk, or hit you with a tail unpleasant in several ways. You had to release the anger in some way that caused no harm. Obscenities were relatively rare.
These farmers had no television. The daily newspapers were avidly read and the local papers searched for market prices, the names of people one knew and so on. At night they would read books of all kinds. One effect was that many unschooled farmers were really well-educated men, quite apart from their learned ability to read the land and the sky. They had an ear for the rhythms and music of our language, I know, because I listened to groups of them talking at times about almost every subject, from Scottish history to Aboriginal legends, from astronomy to international politics.
The largest group of expressions I found were insults about intelligence, perhaps surprisingly. My memory is that most of these were used, most of the time as very low-key insults, in an almost affable way. You could speak of a dill or a dingbat, a nong or a nincompoop, a galoot or a Galah, and the way the word was said made the depth of the meaning very clear.
I put together a list of the expressions we used in the late 1940s and early 1950s, things that I remember but have not heard in years. Within 24 hours I had over 300,
That was surprising enough, but I was more surprised to see how many were insulting and how many were rather blunt instructions to go away. There were racist and sexist words and all manner of things the thought police would condemn, but they were often not nasty words at all, depending upon the way they were said, and to whom. I won't bore you with them all, but a sample might show the music of the rhythms in some of these, if nothing else.
I won't go into the rights and wrongs. Let's just enjoy them. A place a fair way away it might be beyond the black stump. No-one knows where that is, of course, but it is probably out the back o'Bourke. It is certainly up the scrub somewhere, but none of these involve the never-never, the outback.
The expressions of surprise contained the best examples, like blow me down, bugger, stone the crows, starve the lizards or strike me pink
A bloke could be a cove or a coot. A friend could be a cobber, an offsider, a number two, and if he was your friend you could him a dingbat or a dropkick or even a bloody Galah, in the right circumstances. Of course, get it wrong, say it too meaningfully, and you'll be cutting a bit close to the bone. You might even get into a blue, a bit of a dust-up.
I was amazed at how the tolerant mateship of those days allowed a huge string of insulting words that were not always insulting at all. Spoken language allows a great deal more subtlety that written language.
One of my favourites is the saying that a bloke "couldn't hit a bull in the backside with a bucket of wheat". This referred to accuracy with a firearm but it grew to refer to general competence, or the lack of it.
I'd better knock this on the head before it goes too far, but let me ask about work, the yakka you put in tody.
Did you work hard today? Of course you did! You were 'going like the blue blazes', were you not? Perhaps you were "flat out like a lizard drinking".
Of course, the boss might be as tough as old boots and you might be tempted to shoot through like a Bondi tram, or even shoot through on the Parson's bike
Some days it might seem as if you'll be working until the cows come home, even if you started at sparrow fart. Now, you've been round the traps a time or two and by now you'd be as cunning as a woodheap rat, so as soon as the whistle blows vanish like a rat up a drainpipe.
If the boss is impossible to work for, and you're no bludger, tell him you'll take off, you'll go on the wallaby. After all, you've got a few miles on the clock so you'll get a job elsewhere.
Mate, you've done a grouse job and if he can't see that he's mad as a cut snake, and he's probably got tickets on himself. He's got some sort of chip on his shoulder
Historically, our language has changed, and so it should, but there should always be a tension between those adopting change and those opposing it, so that the rate of change is balanced. Some of the expressions I now hear are easy on the ear, and both imaginative and colourful. On a mundane level I accept that railway stations are now train stations, but not that something free is now 'for free'.
I (and I dare say many others) enjoy expressions like "a few sandwiches short of a picnic" or "got a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock", and I even like "the bigger the hat the smaller the farm". I like "as mad as a cut snake". It reassures me that we Gippslanders have not altogether lost the rhythms of our original language or the imagination that paints a little colour into how we speak.