An Australian woman living and working the US as a submarine co-pilot has listed the slang words and abbreviations she uses frequently that Americans don’t understand.
Brittany Nash is from Melbourne and has had to rethink her Aussie vocabulary since relocating to Hawaii.
She said she is met with blank stares from friends and colleagues when she drops words like ‘keen’, ‘heaps’, ‘bathers’, ‘sunnies’, ‘trackies’, ‘biccy’, ‘brekkie’ and ‘sunnies’ into a conversation.
‘Why have we done this to ourselves? Americans can barely understand my accent as it is and now we’ve gone and made all these fake words and confused them even more,’ Brittany said.
The expat said she didn’t realise a lot of the Australian phrases she uses daily weren’t ‘real’ words.
Australian Brittany Nash (pictured) who is living in the US and working as a submarine co-pilot has shared the words she didn’t realise were Aussie slang until she relocated to the States
She said she is met with blank stares from friends and colleagues when she drops words like ‘keen’, ‘heaps’, ‘bathers’, ‘sunnies’, ‘trackies’, ‘biccy’, ‘brekkie’ and ‘sunnies’ into a conversation
‘I have said these words with full conviction like they are plucked out of the dictionary and Americans have looked at me like I’m speaking another language,’ she said.
The first word on Brittany’s list was ‘keen’.
She replied she was keen when someone asked if she wanted a coffee but the person didn’t have ‘a single clue’ what she meant.
‘Next word is the word I struggle with the most and it’s ‘heaps’ which means a lot. Ironically I use the words ‘heaps’ heaps. I use it every single day,’ Brittany said.
Someone ‘called her out’ on her use of the word so she searched it on Google with some surprising results.
According to Google ‘heap’ is used to describe a data structure in computer science.
‘What is this?’ Brittany laughed.
‘The next word is ‘bathers’ which I guess is short for bathing suit so it kind of makes sense but I thought bathers was a word on its own. Nope, it’s not real. We made it up,’ she added.
Brittany also said she uses abbreviations like sunnies, brekkie, biccy and trackies that are common in Australia but can confused Americans.
‘I knew these were shortened versions for the longer ones but I didn’t realise how often we opt for the shorter version,’ she said.
Someone ‘called her out’ on the use of the word ‘heaps’ so she searched it on Google with some surprising results. According to Google ‘heap’ is used to describe a data structure
‘If you use these words in the US, Americans will laugh at you and they will mock you to the point you can’t finish what you’re saying.’
Brittany shared the Aussie words she didn’t know weren’t real in a TikTok clip that has now been watched more than 386,600 times and shocked Aussie viewers.
‘Heaps and keen seem like normal words to me,’ one man said and another added: ”Heaps keen’ is a perfect statement’.
‘PEOPLE DONT USE THE WORD KEEN IN AMERICA???’ one viewer exclaimed.
‘We’ve created our own dialect of English Australian,’ someone else pointed out.
Others shared the Aussie words the found baffled international friends including ‘reckon’.
‘I used ‘esky’ when I was talking to my friend from New Zealand and I learned they didn’t use it,’ one woman said.
‘A tour guide was so concerned when I asked for the closest chemist,’ another recalled.
‘My husband told a waiter in the US he didn’t want dessert because he was ‘chockers’ (full) The waiter was so confused,’ laughed a third.
Previously, Brittany shared what her average day is like working as a submarine co-pilot.
She has been working the job of her dreams co-piloting a submarine and giving guests underwater tours of a spectacular reef in sunny Hawaii.
She says on an average day she gets up at 5am, has hour-long breaks in the sun, drives the submarine around the harbour and acts as a tour guide.
Brittany spends her day on the water sailing between the submarine called Atlantis 14, and the tug, shuttle and skip boats, as she helps the crew load and offload tourists for their guided reef tours.
Millions were wowed by Brittany’s ‘idyllic’ day-to-day life and thought she had landed the ‘perfect job’.
Brittany said waking up at 5am is ‘pretty grim’ but she watches the sun rise as she rides her bike to the harbour and checks her schedule for the day.
She boards the submarine and completes a series of checks and measures to make sure all the vessels are working for the day.
Previously, Brittany shared what her average day is like working the job of her dreams co-piloting a submarine and giving guests underwater tours of a spectacular reef in sunny Hawaii
‘We go onto our shuttle boat and have our little morning meeting, we just discuss the day and what the conditions are like and then it’s time to leave,’ she explained in a TikTok clip.
After the meeting, Brittany is back on the submarine where she ‘gets on the sticks’ to drive it out of the harbour where it is attached to a tug boat and dragged out to the main dive site.
After a few hours of work Brittany gets to her ‘favourite part of the day’ where she can relax on her first break.
‘For over an hour, I get to sit on top of the submarine and do sweet f*** all. I watch the sunrise, do bit of yoga, read my book, definitely take a bit of nap because I’m very tired,’ she said.
‘Then eventually they call me on the radio which means I probably have to get up and do some work again.’
After three tours, Brittany can spend her break relaxing in the sun on a boat. ‘Then I can see the Discovery’s coming back with our next group so back on the skip, back on the sub,’ she said
Brittany gets into her uniform and the submarine ready for the first dive of the day then heads to the top where the crew are getting the first load of guests off the shuttle on board the sub.
‘We do six different tours every single day. First dive, I do a narration, I just talk about all the different reefs we see and the different marine life,’ she said.
‘Second tour of the day, I’m on the Discovery (shuttle) so I take all those guests off the sub and back to pier. I go to bow to help us tie up.’
Throughout the day Brittany sees a litany of marine life from dolphins to sharks and turtles.
Once she ties up the shuttle, she gets the next group of guests on board and ‘gets on the mic’ to give them a safety brief and talk on what landmarks they will be seeing on their underwater tour.
‘For our third tour, once everyone is on board and the hatch is closed, I get to go on the skip and have a break on our tug boat,’ the co-pilot said.
‘It’s hot so I put on my bathers and get a little bit of vitamin D then I can see the Discovery’s coming back with our next group so back on the skip, back on the sub for the fourth tour of the day, I am the co pilot.’
As co-pilot, Brittany can put her tour guide duties aside so she can make sure all the guest board the sub safely and keep an eye out of any hazards on the tour.
‘I basically just sit back there and make sure we don’t crash into anything. For the most part, I just talk to the pilot and have a good old yarn,’ she said.
Brittany can have another break during the day’s fifth tour where she has a snack and reapplies her sunscreen.
After taking the skip for a ‘joy ride’ to practice driving it, the Aussie guides the sixth and final tour of the day.
‘I do one more narration then back to the surface, open the hatch take all the passengers back, get changed, eating again because it’s been ten hours at this point and then take the boat back to the harbour and done,’ she said.
Brittany’s ‘not your regular 9-5’ job video has been viewed more than 4.3million times and drew in thousands of responses from viewers who were ‘jealous’ of the co-pilot’s ‘dreamy’ life.
‘The perfect job doesn’t ex…oh wait,’ one woman said and another agreed: ‘Well you have the coolest job ever’.
‘Ohhhhh that’s cool, it’s a sub tour! I didn’t know that was a thing,’ a third wrote.
‘My motion sickness could never however I’d die for this job!’ someone else said.
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