Chambers has a lot of entries with ‘(Aust)’ or ‘(NZ)’ and even ‘(Aust and NZ)’. They are meant to be examples of English as used in what the English call the Antipodes. (The UK never seems to realise that it is the Antipodes.)
So, under ‘utility’:
A small pick-up truck (in full utility truck or vehicle; short form ute; Aust and NZ)
And under ‘booay’:
booay, booai or boohai (NZ)
noun
A remote rural place
Now ‘ute’ is a solid example. It’s used – the Aussie ‘Jingle Bells’ has ‘Oh, what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden Ute’ – but, by and large, Chambers is wrong in these attributions. ‘Up the booay? Never heard of it.’
I think this is part of the same process whereby slang terms slip into the dictionary – by the time they’re there they have either been forgotten, or they are no longer quite slang. Even my Reed Dictionary of NZ English (reassuringly also a big red book) doesn’t have ‘booay’; it does have ‘bookau’, a colonial mispronunciation of ‘pukahu’ which is the mass of matted vegetation underneath kauri trees.
I should note that when it comes to M?ori words, Chambers is pretty good. ‘Whanau’, for instance, though given simply as ‘(NZ)’ is definitely used widely. If I may temporarily leap on my hobby-horse at this point: there is no ‘S’ in the M?ori alphabet – singular and plural forms are the same. So it’s ‘one morepork, two moreporks’ but ‘tahi ruru, rua ruru’. I’ve been as guilty of saying ‘rurus’ as many others, but no longer!
‘(A) box of birds’, as in “I’m box o’ birds, mate” is certainly to be heard around – but Chambers doesn’t have it. Here’s an article about it from an excellent site sadly no longer updated: https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-box2.html. It does give a very immediate hint of a grid.
So, I produced a perimeter full of birds, with the phrase in the centre.
Well, not quite that. The birds in the perimeter fitted together, but the words that led to them were misprinted versions. Jiggling the order deferred discovery of the theme a little more (though the editor got two birds quite quickly and realised what was going on).
It was surprising how many of the misprints were of initial letters – it was probably just easier to spot those. And I was also surprised that a couple of what appeared to be common enough words were not in Chambers. But any given dictionary will always have its blind spots, I suppose – didn’t Chambers hold out against ‘jamjar’ for a surprising length of time?
But a nice straightforward puzzle, I hope. The inclusion of ‘ending’ in the title was a wish for the solvers, not any sort of assertion by the setter. I already have a working proof of the next one.
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