KEY POINTS:
Fiji's Labasa Magistrates' Court registry office strikes a personal note.
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Kiwi Teenglish (a teen version of English):
"My 14-year-old friend tells me 'def' is 'totes' the new 'definitely', and 'totes' is 'def' the new 'totally'," writes a reader from Opotiki.
"Our 11-year-old daughter is driving us crazy with 'random' meaning strange, weird, or unusual," writes Vanessa. "For example, 'Dad, you are so random'."
Patrick McMahon overheard his girls using the word "liza". "I thought it was some obscure reference to the famous actress Liza Minnelli but I couldn't think of why ... the reference was actually short for fertiliser, meaning good s**t."
(Email Sideswipe with examples of Kiwi teen lingo.)
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Doctors, secondary school teachers and social workers from outside Europe will no longer be recruited to work in Britain under the points-based immigration system which is to come into force in November. But the occupational shortage areas identified include skilled ballet dancers and sheep shearers.
The experts heard evidence from the Royal Ballet that very few British applicants had the required level of artistic excellence or aesthetics.
The new rules will enable a group of 500 Australian and New Zealand shearers who travel the world working on up to 400 sheep a day to continue to operate in Britain, where they shear 20 per cent of the British flock.
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Andrew reckons sneakers hanging from power lines is graffiti with shoes and not an indicator a tinny house is nearby, but this guy disagrees: "I'm in southeast Auckland (not the part where the guns and knives get flashed around) and Andrew is dead wrong. Cruise down our way and I could walk you from shoes on power line directly up to the tinnie house they advertise in several streets. Maybe someone from the police would like to set the record straight?"
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A reader writes about the sign in the Korean restaurant saying they'd run out of "crap": "They most probably meant to write crab. In Korean there is no clear distinction between P and B so they often make mistakes like that.
I lived in Korea for three years and of course my expat friends and I were always amused to read 'crap' on English menus, or have our students write things like 'I love king crap'."
