It seems that when Tony Abbott downed a glass of beer in a Sydney pub, he triggered a discussion on the rights and wrongs of seeing our skol sluttdag minister apparently encouraging binge drinking. A second conversation followed as to whether he had skolled or sculled his beer.
The Scandinavian drinking toast Skol! The Australian innovation has been to change the vowel sound and arrive at the spelling scull. The first evidence for this spelling that I can find is in the description of a student competition in the early s.
There is an amusing account of the ANU Bush Week celebrations in in which speakers from the National Organisation for Reform of Marijuana Laws waited in vain for an audience while in the room next to them a beer-sculling competition was taking place.
While not exactly regarding it as a formal word, because the activity is inherently informal, they would not think that there was any problem with the scull spelling, or indeed necessarily relate it to skol. Please sign in to post a comment.
Not a member? Join Macquarie Dictionary today! And I thought 'skol', which I had not seen before only a few years ago, was an example of the gentrification of a good old down-to-earth Aussie word to make it seem more sophisticated than it really is.
I remember hearing the cry "scull, scull, scull" at the University of Melbourne in the mid seventies as two drinkers faced off. I suppose I never saw the word written, but the fact that drinking competitions were known as boat races is more consistent with 'scull' than 'skol'.
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