Confusing Lingo

Lately, my house mate Rob has been calling me "Aluminum".  Why you ask?  An odd choice of nickname, I know, but it came about one night as I asked him for some aluminum foil for cooking.  "Say it again, mate," he told me.  "Aluminum," I said.  "Aww, mate, that's all wrong.  It's aluMINium!"   The Australians say it as the rest of the world does: aluminium  (see my spell checker just told me to correct that).  The extra "i" at the end makes all the difference.  It's so funny how the way I say this word throws Rob for a loop every time, and it's become kind of a joke every time we cook.  Rob will even come home from his work and say, "How ya going, aluminum?" with a cheeky grin on his face.  It's so funny to me how in one part of the world, 300 million people won't bat an eye at hearing the word aluminum, but on the other side of the world, saying the phrase, "Where's the aLUminum foil?" causes these short pregnant pauses where the hearer grins slightly to himself, always reminding you that you say things quite funny.

Another prime example of how the lingo and pronunciation here can cause a bit of confusion happened when Rob and I were biking through Princes Park situated just north of the University of Melbourne.  We had a choice of a couple of different paths to head down through the park, and Rob said to me, "Let's go down this way, mate.  The symmetry is really nice."  I thought to myself, well this is a sensitive side of Rob I haven't seen yet.  He's perceptive of the balance and beauty bestowed on things because of symmetry.  Must be the architect in him.  So I responded in agreement saying something like symmetry tends to be universally thought of as beautiful and a lot of times really attractive people are thought to be that way because of the symmetry of their face.  Rob cranes his head around while standing up on his bike and gives me this perplexed look.  "Mate, what the hell are you talking about?  There's a bloody cemetery over here!"  I then looked to my left and sure enough, a huge beautiful "sim-eh-tree" was there, plain and simple.  These sorts of things happen from time to time here in Australia.  The lingo and expressions developed on this island nation will take awhile to get down, I guess.