The talk was by Tony Deverson from the University of Canterbury, talking about creating a dictionary of New Zealandisms and one of those that yhe brought up was to turn to custard, which is basically equivalent to Australian English to go pear-shaped. That, however, is not the New Zealandism that I want to share. When he was trying to gauge from the audience the wider use of the term, specifically whether it was used in Australia, he refered to Australia as The West Island.

In other news, I present tomorrow, so I’ll post something afterwards about how it unfolds. This will be my first time presenting anything, ever! And now someone needs to set up for their presentation, so I’d better go!

Via the Speculative Grammarian.