Robyn’s Secret Passage

Facebook, which is awesome, has a function that lets you buy a “gift” for another user. Gifts are cute little icons and they cost one American dollar.

I’ve been having fun spending my hard-earned money on them, and I’ve become quite familiar with the available gift icons. So I came up with a list of my 10 favourite icons on the Facebook gifts.

(Non Facebook users can look away now, or alternatively read social-network expert Danah Boyd’s thoughts on Facebook gifts.)

Cupcake
One of my workmates recently brought a really nice cupcake as a thank you for her team leader. Cupcakes are the best little gifty thing ever so it makes sense that Facebook would have cyber cupcake gifts. But here’s the thing - you can’t at a Facebook cupcake. It is but a hollow promise of the real thing.

Engagement ring
I really like the idea that at least one person has gifted their sweetie a Facebook engagement ring and nervously composed a message to go with it. (ur my life i <3 u will u b my wife????) But the diamond on the Facebook ring is gigantic, which sets up an expectation that is sure to disappoint the ring-having fiancee.

Two champagne glasses clinking
This one is so awesome. It’s not just two glasses of bubbly, but two glasses clinking together like something out of a hip-hop music video. “Girl, I will buy you champagne and treat u like a lady in the way in which you will be accustomed to bcuz ur my princess.”

Handcuffs
The ‘cuffs serve a dual purpose. If you have a Facebook friend who is a law enforcement official, you can send him a pair to show your appreciation for his hard work. And also if your have a Facebook friend who is a teenager who has a passing knowledge but no experience of sexual bondage, you can send her handcuffs for a laugh.

Ninja
See PIRATE SKULL WITH EYEPATCH AND HEADSCARF

Empty shotglass
There’s a full shotglass, but this one is far more interesting. See, it’s an empty vessel. If you gift this to someone, you are saying, “I am empty inside. I need you to fill me up.” If a woman sends you this, she is likely desperate to have babies. If a man sends you this, he wants to have drunken sex0rs with you.

Panda
OMG! Everyone loves pandas! They are so cute with their white bits and their blacks bits and their roly-poly furry bits! I love pandas! I want a pet panda. I will call him Mr Xiu-Xiu and we will play in the garden and have tea together!

Pirate skull with eyepatch and headscarf
See NINJA

Red plastic cup
This is the kind you see in American college comedies where the students are having a “kegger” party which involves drinking beer in red plastic cups, and lots of yelling and general hilarious debauchery. This would be a good Facebook gift to give someone if you wanted to give them a booze-related gift, but didn’t want their profile to be sullied by an obviously booze-related icon.

Lei
Another double meaning gift. A lei can either represent flowery, tropical loveliness, with pretty colours and golden sunsets, or you can make a pun about “getting lei’d”.

Blue vodka jelly shot
You could get into trouble with this icon. If you sent it to a wild young student person, they would go, “A blue vodka jelly shot! All right!” But if you gave it yo your mum, she would go, “Is this a cup of Mr Muscle window cleaner? I don’t understand. Do you want me to come over and clean your windows? I really think you’re old enough to do your own cleaning.”

New Zealanders sad at their country’s team not winning the America’s Cup boat race (again) may be pleased at their fair country’s placing at the top of a different table.

I just came across this recent article in The Economist looking at the price of cocaine around the world.

Not surprisingly it’s cheapest in South America. Britain and the US pay around US$100 a gram, Australia and Japan pay around US$250 a gram, but here’s the truly awesome bit - right at the high end of the scale is New Zealand with US$715 per gram. Yes, Aotearoa New Zealand is home to the most expensive cocaine in the world.

That explains why it seems the only people who seems to use coke in these parts are vile property developers.

The article blames this on New Zealand’s relative isolation from South America, which sounds right. And of course what this means is that when Kiwis want to get their uppity up-up highs, they turn to methamphetamines, usually ones made from over-the-counter cold and flu remedies using that good old-fashioned do-it-yourself, number-eight fencing wire Kiwi ingenuity mentality. Go Kiwi!

Or maybe we should be embarrassed and ashamed by this. I mean, along with wide footpaths with outdoor dining, isn’t one of the hallmarks of a world-class city the prevalence of cocaine? What sort of sophisticated high society doesn’t have uppity up-up cokety coke-coke parties? If we want to lose weight, we have to do so by diet and exercise instead of abusing stimulants. What sort of Third World existence is this?

Actually, in a peculiar way, I think having the most expensive cocaine in the world is something that New Zealanders should be very proud of.

1. It moistened a bunch of posters stuck to a fence, causing the posters to peel off. This revealed “FUCK” written on the fence in black paint - a reminder of a simpler time before the fence was a medium for poster ads. The stormy weather then finished things off by blowing the fence over. Man, the wind is so puuuuunk.

   

   The fence the next day. It had been propped again, but not covered over with more posters.

2. It broke off a bunch of branches from trees. Every park I’ve seen is covered with branches. It gives inner city parks that gnarled urban wasteland look that was quite fashionable in the mid to late ’90s. Obviously this is incredibly naff, so they should be cleaned up asap.
3. It put a pine tree twig in my bath. I’m not sure how it got there, but somehow a twig from a tree two properties away ended up sitting in the bottom of my bath. Logically it seems that the wild wind blew it in through a gap in the bathroom window, but I suspect that actually the branch fled from the bitter outdoors and sought refuge in my bath.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I had a caffeine withdrawal headache and I wasn’t in the mood for no nonsense. I just wanted to get some cash out from an ATM and go along to my favourite cafe and get a coffee.

As I was nearing the door of ASB Bank’s ATM lobby, a middle-aged woman entered it ahead of me. When I got inside, I saw that she was at one ATM, but the other one was out of service, so I stood back about two metres behind her and waited.

She seemed really tense and eventually turned around to look at me. I think she didn’t realise that the other machine was out of service, so she needed to find out why I wasn’t using it and why I was standing behind her.

“Are you waiting to use this one,” she asked. “Yes, that one is out of service,” I explained. She glanced over at it and said, “Oh, I didn’t even notice that when I came in. I just went straight to this one. Well, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t holding you up.”

I thought it was an interesting choice of words. I mean, she hadn’t even been there for minute and yet she apparently felt that she was taking too long.

But then I considered her choice of words - “holding you up”. It seemed like a bit of a Freudian slip. I think she was scared of the strange person lurking behind her. She was alone at an ATM on a quiet Sunday afternoon. She was scared that I was going to hold her up.

She had become quite flustered and seemed in a hurry to get her cash from the machine and leave, away from the notorious gangsta criminal R.O.B.Y.N.

Man, all I wanted was a coffee.

I recently did a bit of research at work to help figure out how to spell the New Zealand slang word chur (and, yeah, that’s the spelling we settled on).

It’s a hard one to look into because it’s the sort of word that’s never used in any sort of formal writing. Online it’s most likely to be found in blogs, forums, social networking websites, but never stuff like newspaper articles or things written by reputable writers.

The first time I heard chur was probably about 20 years ago, and yet it doesn’t appear to have made it into any Kiwi slang lists. Instead those are chocker with the kind of words that probably only your great-uncle and his cobbers down at the RSA use non-ironically.

So I guess it falls upon me - oh the burden - to get something down in writing. This is what I’ve found - there are two separate words - chur and che.

chur (tʃɜː)

• Chur is pronounced with the ‘ch’ in ‘chair’ and the long vowel sound in ‘bird’.
• It could also be spelt cher, but I don’t like this because it’s confusing with Cher the singer (pronounced ‘Sheer’)
• Use 1. Chur is used appreciatively, in the way that someone might say “awesome” or “excellent”. Eg “They had a two-for-one special on Tim Tams at the supermarket!” “Chur!”
• Use 2. Chur is used to show thanks. “Do you want this packet of Tim Tams? We bought too many.” “Oh, chur!”
• Chur is often coupled with a vocative term, eg, “Chur, bro.”
• The vowel sound in chur can be drawn out to emphasise the appreciation. “Chuuuuur! That’s awesome!”

che (tʃɛ)

• Che is also pronounced with the ‘ch’ in ‘chair’, but takes the shorter vowel sound in ‘bed’.
• Che is a shorter-sounding word.
• Use 1. Che can be used to mean an affirmative, like “OK” or “yep”. Eg “I’m off to the supermarket.” “Che.”
• Use 2. Che is often doubled as che-che. This used about the same as Use 1 of chur - to show appreciation or praise.

Origins

So where did this interesting word/s come from? I dunno… But I did pick up a few theories:

• It’s short for cheers.
• It’s short for choice.
• It’s short for true.
• There was this guy in Rotorua who had a speech defect and when he tried to say “choice” it came out as “chuuuuu”.
• Howard Morrison invented it.*

I’m sure that it originates from Maori English, but how it got there is less certain. It seems that chur and che probably have the same root, but it could also be argued that they might be from two separate sources.

As a disclaimer, I should note that I did a couple of first-year linguistics papers and I have vague hobbyist interest in New Zealand English, but that’s about it.

Most of this is speculation. I just want to get what is in my brain out on the interwebs. If anyone has any more information or theories about chur/che, do share!

* Here’s a clip from Eating Media Lunch, where Howard Morrison claims to have invented chur in 1960: