cheeky bugger
whenever i tell a story to my class, they cant tell if im telling a joke or confessing a crime or slipping back into mental illness. the response is always mixed. if i act out the story with faces and miming, they might laugh, but nothing i say makes them laugh as much as the bit in Red Dog when the dog steals the miner’s sausage and the miner looks at the dog and the music pauses and the miner says: “cheeky bugger”.
cue the entire student body giggling and elbowing each other and repeating the line: “cheeky bugger”. australian english not being their first language, they dont know what cheeky bugger means but the comedic pause and record scratch and burly man wearing a woman's apron all signify the universal concept of 'joke'.
later in the day, a student will inevitably ask me what cheeky bugger means and i’ll point to the big stack of unused dictionaries and tell them to practice their vocabulary discovery skills. they’ll pull out google translate and instantly turn it to chinese, which will tell them that cheeky bugger means something extremely inappropriate for a classroom setting. i’ll then have to dull the uproar and embarrassedly explain the term’s colloquial use in australia as a term of endearment, and they’ll understand, but on lunch duty i’ll still hear ‘cheeky bugger’ being shouted across the playground, as if its the nastiest most vulgar phrase in the english language. nobody tells them off, because to australian ears it is vaguely endearing.