Borrowings from American English

We are well aware of the influence that American English has on us today but we are not as aware of our debt to American English in previous times.  Words and phrases that we consider to be quintessential Australian English turn out to be borrowings from American English.

 For example, it seems that the Americans first shortened beauty to beaut somewhere in the 1860s.  The New Zealanders appear to have taken it on board before the Australians but by the early 1900s we had picked it up and made it a regular part of Australian slang.

 The Americans were talking about squatters fifty years before we started using the term.  And the American bushranger was the equivalent of our bushman, someone who could saddle up a horse and live off the land for months on end. Of course we did much more with bushranger than the Americans ever did so we made the term our own just as it was becoming obsolete in American English.

 Similary a bushwhacker was an early 1800s American term for someone who lived in remote parts of the country. It was a synonym for frontiersman.  We acquired the word in the late 1880s for a person who lived in the bush, sometimes with connotations of country bumpkin.  We added bushwhackery, and finally the verb to bushwhackmeaning ‘to work as a labourer in the bush, particularly in clearing ground’.

 Borrowings make their own way in their new circumstances. That applies to borrowings from one variety of English to another, just as much as it applies to borrowings from a foreign language into English.  So all these words have acquired layers of meaning and connotation that they did not have