More Kiwi Slang

Tradies - The traditional hands-on trades, physical professions like construction (builders), plumbing, electricians (sparkies). They are notorious for being fearless (aka reckless) drivers and will want to pass you if you are driving like a timid tourist (it me!) on twisty NZ rds and through residential areas. There seems to be a rhetoric of respect towards tradies as being the quintessential common man. Maybe this is something that happens everywhere to a certain degree, but farmers are held in a similar esteem. It gives me an uneasy feeling, probably the way respect for the common man rings so untrue in my experience filtered through American political rhetoric. It feels like a trick. Is it a trick? It is almost certainly a trick.


Bogan - via Ozzie slang. An Antipodean redneck, lowclass, a yahoo. Think 4-wheelers, hunting, and according to my Colorado-come-Kiwi roommate’s associations metalheads. It seems like it used to be thrown around as a purely derogatory term, and now it’s embraced by the subculture (again, similar to redneck)

Fossick/ing - originally panning for gold ingots, not meaning more generally rummaging around.

Spider - an ice cream float. Why? That is a question for another day.

Deranged bloods - medically specific terminology here. Bloods=bloodwork, lab tests. Deranged=literally, out of range. It really makes them sound like little maniacs, though.

Sickie - A sick day, calling off work.

Hungus - a hungry person.

Road maggot - A vehicle going slower than you would like to be driving, especially a caravan (picture the wind blowing the section between caravan and whatever is hauling it, that’s kind of a crawling, undulating movement).

Geez (pronounced with a hard g) - to have a look, I had a student ask me to “giz a geez” to her paperwork, and then she got very embarrassed for having used such out-dated slang. Giz is a contraction for “give us.”