A corkie to the rescue - or not...

Australians have the tendency to simplify many words; presents are called pressies, breakfast is brekkie, the supermarket Woolworth is Wollies, McDonald’s goes by the name Macca’s... The list of Aussie nicknames is endless. There are nicknames for different trades as well. An electrician is called a ”sparkie” because of the sparks that come when the electricity is made. A ”chippie” is a carpenter, named after the chips that come from chopping up wood. A builder is called a brickie, as in the bricks that are used for building a house. The ”-ie” endings can be substituted with ”-y” depending on your fancy.

Serving over-processed food all over the world: Macca's (photo from Wikipedia)

A couple of days ago I had a man of the trade to come and fix in our daughters’ bathroom. In Sweden – and probably in many other countries as well – a bathtub has four short legs so it stands firmly on the floor. Here in Australia, or perhaps I should say here in our house, the bathtub is suspended from a low tiled wall to the bathroom wall where it is only attached by silicone, like they have glued one side of the bathtub to the wall. Every time there’s some weight in the bathtub - like when daughters are taking a bath - the tub is sinking and... well, the silicone is not meant to function as superglue for a water filled bathtub with a teenage girl in it. A gap of 2,5 centimetres between the wall and what is behind the tiles magically appears when the tub is filled with water. The man came and fixed the problem by putting on new silicone that will last until next time our daughters take a bath, which I reckon will be tonight.

                          Our bathtub that is "siliconed" to the wall. 

 I asked him a question about the shower in our master bathroom but he just shook his head and said ”I’m just a corkie”. Corkie? Corky? According to an English dictionary ”corky” is an adjective that means that the wine is tainted in flavor from the cork in the bottle OR it means someone having undesirable or negative qualities, a persona non grata really. It could also mean someone who’s not very clever. Was the man really telling me that he’s a scumbag?! Was he maybe saying that he was not the sharpest tool in the shed? I asked one of the builders – a brickie – who explained that ”corkie” is a corker, someone who puts silicon between tiles as a profession. Considering that our bathtub needs some kind of supporting installation rather than just new silicone, I think in that in this particular case, the corkie might have been somewhat corky. 

                             A meerkat - just because it's cute to look at