Aussie-ism

Our answering machine is a little garbled.

Thus, I was caught out by a person from church leaving his phone number: I thought he said "eight seven two, five seven nine". I tried phoning that, but kept getting someone else. I finally had to phone the church secretary to get his home number.

Turned out he had said "eight double-two, five double-nine". Aussies tend to say ''double'' -- whereas those of us from Seattle just say the number twice (really, neither way is faster than the other...). So, I had heard the two (garbled!) syllables -- "dwah-bah" -- and figured it must be "seven", as all the other single digits (except for zero) are one digit.

Tricky...


--GG