Divided by a common language

One of the great things about Sammie's blog is the way the conversations can spiral off in bizarre and unexpected directions. An entry on Sammie's father's TV-watching setup for a major race this past weekend sent me into a spin over the use of the word "lollies". What the hell was that? Even after Sammie explained, I decided to try to find an online dictionary of Australian slang. Here's one from koalanet.com.au. "Trough Lolly" would be a good name for a band. And the joke-which-has-become-a-best-selling-book, "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves", has a first cousin in the Australian slang term "Wombat", which "eats, roots, and leaves" - but you need to know what "root" means. Let's just say that Australians might look at Americans funny when they sing the line in "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" that goes "So let's root, root root for the home team..."

While doing this little bit of research, I decided to investigate something that's been bugging me for years. There's a scene in the movie Trainspotting (a film about a bunch of wacky fun-loving Scottish heroin addicts, full of great music, great writing, great acting, dead babies crawling across the ceiling, and a scene that inspired me to start hanging out in clubs) where Mark Renton is being forced to go off heroin cold turkey by his parents. "At least get us some jellies!" he pleads with his mother. "No," she responds. "You're worse coming off that than you are with heroin!"

Now, from growing up with the Tom Baker incarnation of Doctor Who, I knew that "jelly babies" were the little gummy candies he was always offering to people and aliens from a small paper sack. I assumed (as did some of my friends) that "jellies" were just gummy candies. Why would Renton want those during his withdrawal agonies? And why would his mother refuse them?

I found an online Trainspotting Glossary that explains what jellies are, and a lot of other stuff too. Needless to say, in Scottish drug slang "jellies" are something quite different than the treats being offered by Doctor Who. (Or maybe not. Feeding tranquilizers to potentially hostile people and aliens might not be a bad idea.)

Another sharp turn on Sammie's blog comments forced me to recall a trip to The World Of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia, where my friends and I sampled Coca-Cola products from around the world and subsequently became very, very ill. Sometimes, cultural enlightenment comes at a price.