Innovative: The phrase “Australian Surf” enters lexicon as derogatory slur!

"Aggressive and unwanted."

As a Master of Applied Linguistics (’01), my ear is highly tuned in detecting the most subtle variances of human communication. It pricks up at the slightest shift, the most delicate turn, and notes how meaning, or play rather therein (Derrida) is being harnessed.

And never are my senses more fully activated than when I’m traveling. Yesterday Paris, today Copenhagen, but I wish that I was in Nottingham, England where the most exciting derogatory slur of the last decade is being introduced to our English language and let’s head straight there, virtually, for it is the next best thing.

A busy Nottingham junction floods every time it rains soaking pedestrians with waves of water, according to one dog walker.

Pub worker Ade Wood has complained to Nottingham City Council about the problem and says he is sick of getting drenched trying to cross at the junction.

The 60-year-old of Nottingham Road, said: “This has been happening for at least a year now and what the video shows is actually tame compared to how it can be.

“Every time it rains it floods and people cannot use the crossing because it is submerged.

“Because most drivers are in a rush they don’t slow down and you get soaked.

“I take my dog that way every day to the small park and it is like an Australian surf coming at you when the cars go through it.

And did you catch it there, at the end? The flooded intersection is “like an Australian surf coming at you…”

Delicious! Now, Australian surf has only literally meant “the surf in Australia” since the great Duke Kahanamoku brought our Pastime of Kings to the savages down under in 1915, but now thanks to pub worker Ade Wood it freshly means an “aggressive and unwanted” approach.

It is being used as a descriptive metaphor here, as in, “Tax season hit me like an Australian surf this year. Ugh.” But I am more excited for its potential as a gerund. Picture being out at a bar and getting hit on by an unruly, fat drunk. “What’s that bro’s deal? He’s fully Australian surfing me.”

It’s art.

But how would you like to use “Australian surf” in its new context?

Endless possibilities.