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Notes -
How do you feel about the Aussie term for it - soft drink? I love it, it's so different to the usual Australian slang, where who cares what it is just take the first syllable, ignore everything else and slap a vowel on the end. D'ya wanna have a barbie for breakie? Nah, me and Kev are gonna take the tinnie out when he gets back from the bottle-o, I'll just have a cuppa and throw some stubbies in the esky." But then you get to carbonated beverages and suddenly it's euphemism city! Soda is starting to make some in roads here though, although despite coming from old soda country, I don't like it. Stick with soft drink Australia! Or if you really have to use something else go with the other Australian slang for it, albeit much less common - fizzy/lolly water.
In Japan the word ジュース or juice means anything not tea, coffee, or booze. So yeah, any fizzy drink (boom!) It's annoying.
I grew up saying Coke because Coke was what we drank. My relatives--good, country people--used to say "Co-cola."
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My kids are now picking up some Australian slang thanks to bluey. "Stuffy" for stuffed animal sticks out the most to me. I now can't remember what I called them as a kid, but it wasn't stuffy.
If you're a fellow burgerclap you probably called them "stuffed animals" or else just [name of animal/character]. I don't know of any other generic name. Some time in the early 2000s(?) I started hearing people say "plushie" but that always sounded like some cutesy/marketing bullshit to me, not a normal word you'd use when l, say, talking to your parents.
I thought "plushie" specifically referred to stuffed toys with a particular outer fabric.
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I didn't think that kind of product would be carbonated; I'd expect it to taste rather flat.
It's a bit of a catch all for any water based sweet drink, I've heard people refer to cordial that way too and I assume that's where it comes from - cordial used to be really popular in Australia. But yeah that was years ago, these days lolly water is mostly used to refer to soda in that traditional Aussie joke format of belittling something so you can laugh at the person who gets upset at your belittling.
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“D'ya wanna have a fizzy?” sounds properly Australian to this Limey’s ears.
Nice, plus the added benefit of the Kiwis usually following the Aussies means I'd get to also enjoy hearing large Maoris saying "D'yuh wunna huv uh fuzzy bruh?" to each other.
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I remember people used to call them fizzy drinks when/where I was a kid.
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