I had to use one of these recently when trying to work out what had gone wrong with an information service I wanted to subscribe to.

I think the call went through to a young woman in the Philippines as she had that typical Hispano-American accent. Sadly, I think English may have been her fourth language and Australian-English, or Strine, was a complete mystery.

It mattered not how much I tried to speak clearly and to strip my speech of any Ocker-isms, she just couldn’t catch what I was saying. It was more my fault than hers.

Years ago when I was fortunate enough to help kick-start the relationship between Bendigo and Maubisse in East Timor, our mission boss, the unstoppable Leon Scott, warned me that not only was I not making any sense to the locals, I was – in short – making a bit of a dill of myself.

“Far too many words, son,” he’d say. “Far too many Australian-isms.” For the East Timorese, English is not their second language. They have their own languages, sometimes very localised, then Portuguese and perhaps then a form of English.

He was right. I’d answer a question with “Yep.” And there’d be puzzled looks. “Yes” was good, or “Okay” but not “Yep, Rightio, No Probs, Job’s on, Absolutely, Affirmatory good buddy, natch, naturally, precisely, oki-doki”, or any one of the other 427 pointless ways we have of agreeing with people.

I saw a statistic the other day which claimed that William Shakespeare used 20,000 words – many of them invented by him – while we have up to 50,000. Which to my mind means 60 per cent of our vocabulary is pointless. Or fluffy decoration.

I have been infuriated (there’s a surprise, eh?) by one phrase which is sweeping the TV and entertainment globe: “in the day” and “back in the day”. I first started to notice it a few weeks back and now there’s hardly a program on which is it not used, perhaps as a way of showing how fashionable the speaker is.

The saying used to be “back in my day” or “in the days of the dinosaurs” (increasingly interchangeable in my house). Now, it’s abbreviated to “in the day” – a meaningless waste of vocal chord vibrations. I’d put it up there with “so” as the opening word of any spoken sentence, and the rising inflection at the end on the Bloody Annoying chart.

Many Australians don’t make the effort so strip their speech of time-wasting words, mannerisms  or accents when talking to people from other lands. A couple of times we’ve had issues communicating with exchange students who believed they were capable of reasonably good English.

“What is this cat chew layder?” they’d ask. “Oh, I will see you again later, eh?” And we had one exchange student who, after a rollicking good year in Bendigo, went back to Norway and failed an English test. Mind you, it’s not just us. We had two French exchange students who attended a French language class at one of Bendigo’s secondary colleges … and had no idea what the teacher was saying.

One young woman from New Mexico was horrified to hear that the Bushwhacked household fed the cats “dried snakes” for breakfast. Apparently “snacks” sounds very similar to “snakes” when spoken by an Australian.

So, umorfally sorry that we doan speak better, but uts roolly no biggie, eh? Memo to the sub-editor: p’raps best not to Spellcheck this, oki-doki?