wordies

There's some cute words in New Zealand, and a lot of them seem to end with "ie."

• Your breakfast might be called a breakie. One restaurant offers the Big Breakie, the Vegie Breakie and the Continental Breakie.
• An umbrella is a brolly
• A bag of candy is called lollies which is short for lollipops, but doesn't mean the candy is on a stick. It's just general candy.
• Your relatives are called the rellies
• Your aunt is always known as your auntie (but your uncle is just an uncle)
• Diapers are called nappies which is short for napkins
• Fizzie is pop (a carbonated drink). All fizzies are outlawed at my school. We confiscate them and pour them out.
• The mailman is called the Postie. And they're usually women. And they ride bikes on thier routes. And they don't pick up your letters; they only deliver.
• The Salvation Army is called the Sallies. (As in: Take your donation to the Sallies.)
• Ozzies are Australians. New Zealanders have a HUGE inferiority complex/rivalry with the Australians. If our rugby team loses all its games except the one against Australia, it's still considered a successful season
• Pommies are the British. There's LOTS of British people living here. I don't know why they're called Pommies, though.
• Boaties are people who go boating all the time and there's plenty of them! Yachties are essentially the same except with more money and bigger boats.
• Surfies are ubiquitious here, too - not just in Australia
• Bikies are motorcycles gang-types, what Americans call bikers. Somehow "bikies" just doesn't sound very scary

Other cute words:
• A summer home is a bach, short for bachelor, which refers to small bachelor's homes built by early settlers and later used as summer homes. Now it refers to any summer home of any size.
• A BBQ is called a sausage sizzle. We had one at school on Meet the Teacher night. The Deputy Principal barbecued sausages (like bratwurst) for all the students and their parents, and the sausages were served on a slice of bread rather than a hot dog bun.
• A chin wag is a long conversation
• Do-up is a fixer-upper (a house that needs some work on it). After you do up the kitchen you could sell it for a profit.
• Everyone uses the word heaps instead of tons as in "I have heaps of homework tonight"