The Things We Learn from Aussies

This post is a bit long, but if you stick it out, you will be rewarded with titillation in the end. No, don't just skip down!

I fluently speak the language of love in (American) English and Italian. You'd think I'd be fluent in Spanish or at least Spanglish by now, after all the... er... um... just forget I mentioned that... but alas, my knowledge there is limited to a few choice words and phrases. Still, it's more than I knew before. And that's really my goal: how can I expand my vocabulary? I'm all for learning international synonyms for horny.

I've been to fourteen other countries and learned a bit in each. Jamaica was a good time, but Thailand... I'd share, but I'm not sure I could spell what I learned in Bangkok's red light district.

Yet with all my globe-trotting, I've still not yet been to Australia. My knowledge of Aussie slang has therefore been limited to what I've learned drooling over rugby players on cable television. You don't pick up a lot of bedroom talk watching ESPN, I'll tell you that much. All right, so I may have learned a thing or two from the boys over at Eight Mile Creek, an expat-run pub and restaurant here in NYC’s…get this…Little Italy. Yes, I went to Mulberry Street for sticky date pudding. And I learned a thing. Or two. But not even as much as I've learned of French, and that doesn’t range far beyond the lyrics to “Lady Marmelade” and the text on Toulouse-Lautrec posters.

What makes my limited Oz-speak so grating is the fact that over the past year or so, it’s been positively……raining Australians here at the headquarters of JillWrites. Not just in cyberspace. IRL. Seriously. Aussies falling from the sky. Like how I spent the month of August with a theater company from Melbourne. If you’ve ever worked in theater, you know that theater folk are generally pretty open about their sexuality. How did I not expand my vocabulary? Yet there we were, outside a vegetarian restaurant in the East Village, comparing educational systems. You know how I embrace the word "geek", but frankly, this was just nerdy. We could have been comparing pillow talk, but there we were, debating the merits of balanced literacy. Hey, I hear there are a lot of books in Australian classrooms! Not text books. Like, real books. You know, New York City is implementing the Australian literacy model—WHO THE F*&K CARES? How about learning some dirty words, you nerdy English teacher? No. What did I learn instead? Euphemisms for yeast infections. Oh yes. Apparently gals down in the sultry South Pacific have a slew of words on the topic. I guess it’s like Eskimos and snow.

But then, finally—FINALLY!—an Aussie gave me a word that I was truly excited to learn. So for the second time this week, I’m going to thank Steph—yes you!—for leading me somewhere fabulous. This week, I learned the word “toey.”

F*ckin’ A.

I’m reading Steph’s post, and I get down to the bottom, where she throws in this cute little footnote: *Toey, Aussie speak for horny ;). Score! New word! So being the nerd that I am, I have to Google it for etymology, connotation, precedent—you know, the normal things that people are curious about when they learn how to talk naughty. And I come across this absolute gem of a paragraph, from Adam Ford’s website The Scam:

“I like it because it implies so much more than 'horny' - being toey has the additional connotation of being edgy, on your toes, ready to spring into action at the slightest provocation, blurring the lines between fighting and sex which confirms what we all know, that sex is best when it approximates fighting, a good bed throw, a hand around your throat, being aggressively pulled into position by the dominant other, sweat, bitemarks, a loss of control, the nagging feeling that you could maybe be out of your depth.”

Yes please.

Read it again.

(I did.)

Thank you, Adam Ford. That’s the single best explication of a word’s connotations that I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

Though I’d probably throw in “itchy and restless,” but that’s just me. (They should be used together, otherwise “itchy” could be taken literally, as you will see if you read on.)

Then I called Violet and read it to her.
“Could you read that to me again?”
I did.
“And email me the link?”

Violet is the woman who forced me to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD’s so that I could experience Spike. In case you haven’t figured it out, Spike makes me pretty damn toey.

I enjoy expressing my wonder in rhetorical questions, and this paragraph had me in absolute awe. “Where the hell has this word been all my life?”
Violet likes to state the obvious. “Uh…Australia.”
“Like, who knew about this, and why didn’t they tell me?”
Violet starts listing random Australians.
“Why don’t we have a word that means that?”
She agrees. “"Horny" doesn’t really do it for me.”
“Well, we should make one up.” Oh, yes. One of my brighter ideas. And just like that, the quest begins.

Dialogue ensues:
Her: How do you make words up?
Me: You pick out sounds you like.
Her: It ought to sound like moaning.
Me: Toey does not sound like moaning.
Her: But it shouldn’t be too smooth. It shouldn’t be a smooth moaning. Because he’s got his hand on your neck. It’s hard to moan that way. And there should be a guttural-ness to it. But a pretty word. Something with a lot of consonants. Three syllables? A compound word. Do people make words up?
Me: Uh…"flibbertigibbet"? But that was a few hundred years ago.
Her: Well of course, people made up more words back then, because they didn’t have as many words.
Me: Something like “writhing.” I’ve always liked the sound of “writhing.”
Her: A word that you can slide into. Something that’s not explicitly sexual. And not exactly like itchy. Rashes. Aren’t. Sexual.
Me: And it needs to be something you can draw out. Like wriiiiiithing.
Her: That’s my number one problem with toey. It’s too short. You don’t want someone to turn to you and say “Hey baby, I feel so toey.”... “Well, can I get you some powder?” It’s the same problem with "horny". It doesn’t work.

I personally think it should be the kind of word that sounds good whispered.

We could have gone on like that all night, but it was quite late. And I already knew what had to happen next...

I had to tell you all about it. What good is the blogosphere, if not to promote "toey-ness"? Surely, there's more out there! So I dropped Adam Ford an email and here we are. Any suggestions? Or lessons? Lessons are most appreciated.


And if you haven't checked out Adam Ford's work, definitely do! He's a poet, novelist, zine-maker, and comic artist, among other things. And he was cool enough to let me dig up that old post and quote it. Check out his homepage.