Phraseology and Culture in English

party last night, which I could have done without. 
Walker (1996: 106) provides employers with a list of questions to assess 
the “climate” within the company; very significantly, the first of these ques-
tions is: “When was the last time you asked your staff how they enjoyed 

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 Bert 
Peeters
their weekend?” In Australian supermarkets and department stores, finally, 
check-out staff are likely to ask customers (whom they don’t know) ques-
tions such as How was your weekend? or Did you have a good weekend?,
without even the slightest interest in what really happened (for more detail, 
see Béal 1992 and Peeters 1999). 
11. Summary 
On the basis of all the data we have looked at, it seems hard to deny that the 
inhabitants of the “land of the long weekend” (or is it the “land of the lost 
weekend”?) are fascinated by the weekend and with its advent on Fridays, 
as further demonstrated by the polysemy, as yet unrecognised by linguists 
and lexicographers, of the word weekender, the fame of the Easybeats hit 
“Friday on my mind” and the existence of phrases such as Poet’s Day and
Thank God it’s Friday. On Mondays, those fun-loving Australians suffer 
“Mondayitis” or else “that Monday (morning) feeling”, also known in the 
rest of the English speaking world. All this clearly shows that the word week-
end is a key word in Australian English, presumably more so than elsewhere. 
The cultural value hiding behind it, and behind all the cultural and linguis-
tic data explored in this paper, is that of the importance of having “time 
off”, time for oneself, time jealously guarded – as also shown by the typical 
parsimony of the culturally specific replies to conversational routines such 
as How was your weekend? 
Notes
1. Tom Dusevic, “The lost weekend”, Good Weekend, 5 April 1997. The name 
of the magazine is itself significant in a country whose people are as obsessed 
by the weekend as are most Australians. 
2. The data used in this study were taken from various sources, including the 
world-wide-web, conversations with native speakers, readings and personal 
observation. I wish to thank the editor of this volume for correcting a handful 
of stylistic infelicities, as well as an anonymous reviewer for making a num-
ber of useful comments. The usual disclaimers apply. 
3. Candace Sutton, “Stealing weekends from mum, dad and the kids”, The Sun-
day Herald, 8 September 2002. 
4. Writing in the February/March 2002 issue of Nature & Society, the magazine 
of an identically named forum based in Canberra, Wanless was guided by an 

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103
article titled “Slow cities”, published in the Canberra Times on 8 January 
2002.
5. It may be of interest to point out that, in 2004, Victoria and Tasmania were 
the only states where a replacement holiday for Anzac Day (the commemora-
tion of the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli, in Tur-
key, in the first World War), which fell on a Sunday (25 April), was not 
granted. 
6.
Lucky Country and Clever Country are other fairly widely used expressions 
referring to Australia. The former is the creation of historian Donald Horne 
(Horne 1964) and was meant to be ironical – until it started on a life of its 
own. The latter is due to Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke and goes back to 
the 1990 election campaign. 
7. Cf. Paul Robinson, “Tired? You’re at work longer”, The Age, 8 October 
2001; Frank Devine, “Overemphasis on overwork is a waste of time”, The
Australian, 29 November 2001. 
8. The call for reassessment of current thinking can take a broader perspective, 
as in the following excerpt (Christopher Pearson, “Enemies at our doorstep”, 
The Weekend Australian, 20 March 2004): “For years Australia has been a 
target for Islamic terrorists. Yet the surprise and outrage evident in last 
week’s letters to the editor suggest that the lessons of Bali have not been 
learned and that the land of the long weekend lives on in the infantilised 
minds of many.” 
9.
The concise Australian National Dictionary (Hughes 1992) defines sickie as
“a day’s sick leave; esp. as taken without sufficient medical reason”. The
dinkum dictionary of Aussie English (Antill-Rose 1990) goes even further: a 
sickie is described as “a day taken off work with pay because of illness, but 
more likely to go to the beach or the tennis”. It is possible to be “too crook to 
take a sickie”: “You don’t want to waste a sick day by being at home in bed 
ill, you might just as well go to work” (ibid.). 
10. There is a third way to define the week: in daily usage, one often talks about 
what one has done during the week, i.e. during the working week, from Mon-
day to Friday. 
11. The success of these talks is not guaranteed: “In a nutshell, we only did this 
once or twice. I think people are working such long hours these days that they 
just want to get home to family and friends rather than spend any more time at 
work than they have to” (Brian Spies, personal communication). 
12. The Thank God it’s Friday event organised by the South Tweed Bowls Club 
(The Tweed Coast, New South Wales) runs from 2 to 3.30 pm. In Wollon-
gong (same state), there is a duo which visits all the pubs etc. in the region; 
their name is the Thank God it’s Friday Duo. In Sydney, between 1993 and 
1996, there was a branch of that world famous club of running drinkers or 
drinking runners called the Sydney TGIF Hash House Harriers. In Mel-

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 Bert 
Peeters
bourne’s South Yarra, there is a pub called TGIF (not to be confused with the 
American fast food restaurant chain TGI Friday’s, which has branches 
throughout Victoria and at Melbourne international airport). 
13. Not to be confused with an instrumental piece of the Boola Boola Band 
(Gippsland, Victoria) called “Poet’s day, smash the windows”. This piece was 
written one Friday evening (Brian Strating, personal communication) and 
ends with the noise of breaking glass. 
14. On the word weekender, see Section 3. 
15. Australian poet Henry Lawson, author of a poem called When I was king,
“will be king for the day”. American poet Robert Frost, author of a poem 
called After apple-picking, “is out picking apples”. American poet W.H. 
Auden, who was a stretcher-bearer during the civil war in Spain, is 
“stretching around in Spain”. Australian poet Les Murray “writes a pream-
ble” (a reference to the highly controversial preamble to a revised Austra-
lian constitution which he wrote in 1999 at the request of prime minister 
John Howard; the text was voted down shortly after in a national referen-
dum). Etc. 
16. What the salesman didn’t know, and what I would only find out when check-
ing through my notes, later that afternoon, was that I had made a mistake. The 
song I should have questioned him about was called Poet’s Day, whereas 
Mondayitis is the title of a poem by Australian poet Kerry Scuffins (see below). 
17. I am aware of one reference in the German-speaking Swiss press: the St. Gal-
ler Tagblatt of 2 October 2000 first uses the word Mondayitis, defines it, then 
translates it as Montagitis (cf. Feine 2003: 439). 
18. Worth a mention, even though there is no link whatsoever with anything that 
has been said before: the existence of an Australian film production company 
called Mondayitis Productions Pty Ltd. 
19. Cf. also Hassed, “Work, rest and play”, Australian family physician 31,
(2002: 565): “It has been known for some time that Monday mornings are the 
peak period for heart attacks but, it seems, this is only among the working 
population. It is also the peak time for strokes. (...) One study of general prac-
tice referrals also found a peak in cardiovascular events on Mondays and, in-
terestingly, an increase in incidence of headaches on Tuesdays. Perhaps this 
was the hangover from Monday? So, it seems, there may be much wisdom in 
the commonly held view that people suffer from what we call ‘Mondayitis’.” 
20. I am reluctant to call these phrases formulae, even though this would increase 
consistency and strengthen links with other papers in this volume (as pointed 
out by the anonymous reviewer). Within NSM semantics, the term formula is
primarily used to refer to semantic explications relying on the lexicon and the 
grammar of the natural semantic metalanguage (cf. Section 4). In the end, a 
decision was made to avoid the term formula altogether, irrespective of its 
meaning. 

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