Vocabulary
There are a number of dialectal words and phrases used in New Zealand English. These are mostly informal terms that are more common in casual speech.
New Zealand adopted decimal currency in the 1960s and the metric system in the 1970s. Despite this, several imperial measures are still widely understood and encountered, such as feet and inches for a person's height, pounds and ounces for an infant's birth weight, and in colloquial terms such as referring to drinks in pints.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand Slang
Famous quotes containing the word vocabulary:
“A new talker will often call her caregiver “mommy,” which makes parents worry that the child is confused about who is who. She isn’t. This is a case of limited vocabulary rather than mixed-up identities. When a child has only one word for the female person who takes care of her, calling both of them “mommy” is understandable.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)
“One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)