Is Don, Is...Cured Pork Meats?

When I did Sociolinguistics at uni, we looked a bit at the different varieties of English, and there was the usual Australian stuff you'd expect about billabongs and tucker and paddocks and the like. But one thing I was surprised to learn was that the term "economic rationalism" is actually an Australian thing. As the article says, everywhere else it's called "neoliberalism," "Thatcherism" or other names, all with slightly different connotations. (Incidentally, how punk does "Rogernomics" sound?! Like Kathematics but with more rogering.) So basically, all those TV debates and opinion pieces and plays like "Diving for Pearls" would have needed to be "translated" for an overseas audience. I was struck by this at the time because it seemed such an unlikely little chunk of Aussie difference when everything else is dominated by the US and the UK.

Well now I think I've found another one. I was doing a translation about ham, and I came across the word salumi, which is the general Italian word for salami, prosciutto, all the different meats you find in a delicatessen. The dictionary only gave me "cured pork meats," which is obviously hideous. But I thought, hang on, isn't the generic word for all those things "smallgoods"? So why doesn't my dictionary have it? I typed it into the google bar, which for some reason is set to google.co.uk, and found that there were a suspiciously high number of hits with .com.au addresses - that's right, "smallgoods" is an Australian term!! Type it into wikipedia and you get references to the Melbourne Show, the Essendon Bombers, and The Smallgoods, "an Australian indie pop band originally from the Victorian coastal town of Port Fairy."

So now that another of my antipodean bubbles has been burst, I look to you guys for enlightenment - if they don't have the word "smallgoods", can you find out what the poms do call these things? And if they can't come up with a satisfactory alternative, I charge you guys with taking the Aussie word to the world.