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The only thing worse than hearing people casually fling around trendy words and phrases you’ve never heard of is realising you’re so out of touch you still use the word “trendy”. Luckily, help is at hand in this blatant Urban Dictionary ripoff, which handily explains a few of the terms you might have heard in the Link / at the lib/ on the ‘book / at the Cook.

Breezy Ankles (noun)

The decision to include Breezy Ankles in this dictionary was not a decision taken lightly. Breezy Ankles is no fleeting trend. Breezy Ankles is a way of life.

Whenever the endless self-gratification of a law degree becomes too much to bear, Breezy Ankles is there, reminding you that sometimes the difference between a B+ and an A- is a mere four inches of exposed Achilles tendon.

Whenever the depressingly predictability of your Wellington private school -> BA -> minimum-wage-hospo-job-in-Melbs career trajectory overwhelms you, Breezy Ankles is there, the chilly sou’wester gently rearranging your leg hair, reminding you of the volatility of the winds of life.

When we roll up our beige chinos just so, it shows that we are not bound by the stuffy principles of Weather Appropriate Dressing and Selecting Pants That Don’t Make Your Legs Look As Disproportionately Short As a Basset Hound’s. When we eschew a sock layer between our tender foot-skin and desert boots, we silently assert our disdain for the mainstream’s refusal to suffer constant blisters in pursuit of aesthetic perfection. Breezy Ankles is a quiet fuck-you to Harlene Hayne/Logan Edgar/Joe Stockman. It is a powerful stand against the government who dared to take away the student allowance which covers our Slick Willy’s tab. It is our riposte to those who accuse the modern student of political apathy.
It is our fashion YOLO.

Yesterday an overweight Caversham bogan shed her Supre tank top and got a brand new tramp stamp. The tattoo was not of the Chinese characters for “courage”. Nor was it an anaemic butterfly or a miscellaneous Celtic symbol. It was something truly seminal. Etched over her stretch marks in loopy cursive was a phrase which translates as “seize the day”. No, not “Carpe Diem”. The tattoo said, simply, “Breezy Ankles”.

Cunt

1 (interjection)

In this most pure of forms, “cunt” is Dunedin’s answer to the more traditional filler words “um”, “ah”, “hm”, “like”, and “yeah”.

2 (noun)

Paradoxically, a guy. Can be used alone or to add emphasis to virtually any preceding adjective, but especially “mad”, “good”, “sick”, “rude”, and “shit”. “Good cunt” was historically shortened to GC, but this is no longer recommended because someone might think you were actually speaking positively about The GC, a social faux pas from which you might never recover.

3 (cunty,adj)

Difficult, painful, convoluted. Presumably derived from the difficulty of getting laid anywhere other than Dunedin, where a root is never more than a bottle of Corbans away.

Malty (adj)
also malt,maltster (noun)

Contraction of “mainstream alty”, but particularly appropriate because malty is to salty as Milo is to hot chocolate: bland and inauthentic. Usually from Auckland and studying Law or Commerce, the maltster is drawn to the cult of Breezy Ankles with the same propensity and amorous delight with which mares are drawn to raging stallion boners. Except the malty estrous cycle is never-ending and the only cure is rolling up those jeans ever further. Chunky knitwear, Keds, suede desert boots, boat shoes, and condom hats are popular unisex complements to the malty look. The fresh, neutral malty colour palette combines burgundy, mustard, navy, beige, grey and camel with silver or gunmetal accents. On sunny days Wayfarers are de rigeuer, although girls may experiment with circular Karen Walker (for the rich Aucklanders) or Le Specs (for the less rich non-Aucklanders) frames.

Musically the maltster is probably into old school hip-hop and something along the lines of Edward Sharpe or perhaps the Magnetic Zeros or Peter Bjorn and John, although debate rages over whether the latter is malty only in Wellington and full-blown salty further south. Dubstep
and electro were both briefly malty but have ultimately ended
up in Monkey Bar purgatory.

In a stunning paradigm shift in the scarfie blueprint, now virtually every Otago student who is neither truly salty nor a diehard codehead occupies the No Mans’ Land of Malt, which is to the cult of Breezy Ankles as Rome is to Catholicism or Topeka, Kansas is to the Westboro Baptist Church. God Hates Warm Ankles, y’all.

NB: All malties believe themselves to be salty.

Mong (noun, verb)
also monginess (noun), mongy (adj)

Deeply inappropriate and totally offensive but incredibly useful term indicating general uselessness and incoherence; usually a result of excess consumption of pingaz, weed or SoGos. Pre-11pm staggy chat seamlessly transitions into monging in the small hours and the following day. Bong is usually followed by mong.

Rat assed (adj)

So monged you would probably try to wax a Unicol girl if she briefly made eye contact with you across the Monkey Bar D floor and mouthed “Call me maybe”.

SALTY (adj)
also salt, saltster(adj)

Contraction of “so alty”. Where the maltster merely aspires towards alternative credentials, the saltster is the genuine article. This rare creature is endemic to Wellington. Ocasionally one hears whispers on the wind of truly salty Aucklanders or Dunedinites, but such tales are thought to be apocryphal.

Saltsters are Dunedin’s trendsetters. They are a bit like the brown rats which ultimately brought the Black Death from the fringes to the European masses, except they disseminate cultural plagues as opposed to the bubonic kind. Although anyone who was forced to suffer through the topknot trend of 2011 would probably disagree with that minor point of difference. Also like the plague rat, the saltster’s preferred hangouts are rubbish skips (as the gritty urban backdrop for arty photo shoots), opshops (to gather dusty scraps of polyester perfect for nesting), and the kitchen (to pursue pipe dream of professional food blogging).

The only salty degrees are Arts, Music, and Design. There are no exceptions. Salts have been known to fail papers if any lectures, tutorials and exams take place in the pit of malty depravity that is the Commerce Building.

Unlike the maltster, there is no definitive salty ensemble, but saltsters are still easy to identify. Simply look for the person who appears to have slathered their naked body in superglue then taken a casual stroll through a Bolivian shanty town. Hair is unbrushed and asymmetric. On men, facial scruff is mandatory.

When they aren’t lamenting their 2011 MacBook Pro’s lack of retina
display and Instagramming photos of their rustic home baking, the saltster mainlines weird ambient trip-hop and the Smiths. If pressed they would describe their music taste/clothing/lifestyle as “eclectic”, a word which here means “pretentious as fuck”.

Salts never describe themselves as such. To suggest that they belong to any wider social group is bad enough, but to suggest that their complex individual eclecticism can be summed up in a single word is to rub you-know-what in the wounds.

Staggy (adj)

Short for stagnant. Basically the social/career/life equivalent of that hideous destitute period between lunch and dinner when all seems bleak and grey. Most often used in the phrase “staggy chat”, which can be applied to any level of pinging, greened-out, drunk, circlejerky or just plain bad chat. Also useful to describe hungover days, cold days, and generally lazy days. So, basically every day in North Dunedin.

Unicol girl (noun)

A syphilitic amorphous blob of congealed semen.

Wax (verb)

To fuck someone. Derived from the way a woman’s vagina lubricates a man’s penis in the manner of a bogan wielding TurtleWax and a chammy.