This week’s word of the week will cost you around $150 an hour. A dunny diver is a plumber, those stalwart tradies who install and repair piping, fixtures, appliances, and appurtenances in connection with the water supply and drainage systems.
Turd strangler is a more colourful name for a plumber. You laugh but from ancient Roman baths to your modern toilet, plumbers have kept civilisation flowing. To that end, have you heard of green plumbing? It’s plumbing designed to conserve water through recycling or installing rainwater tanks for storage.
When you hire a plumber you better hope they aren’t a blackjack merchant, that is, a bad plumber who disguises poor work with blackjack, a thick black bituminous waterproofing compound.
If you want to learn slang names for other tradies, check out our blog, a ton of brickies.
Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. You can see other Aussie Word of the Week posts from the Macquarie Dictionary here.
