Day For It

Kia ora from Te Anau, New Zealand. I'm supposedly on a recovery tour this week after ten days in Australia for a friend's wedding. My girlfriend Clare has reluctantly been promoted to trip-planner. Since we are both restless by nature, "recovery" has meant bungy jumping off a bridge, a ten kilometer hike, biking around a lake, riding a gondola, and spelunking into a cave full of glow worms. Just today.

Between activities, a travel observation has been quietly percolating. Time in Australia and now New Zealand has made me unusually attentive to slang, and to how vocabulary shapes our behavior, mood, and culture.

My friend Jay got married last week in the countryside a few hours south of Sydney. Jay is an Aussie in the way that makes the word feel explanatory rather than descriptive. Easygoing and mischievous. The kind of person who treats life as something to be fully indulged.

Each day of the wedding trip, Jay would text our massive group chat the same thing:

Day for it.

No context or elaboration. Just a three-word dispatch, sometimes at 6am, often closer to noon. A philosophy compressed into greeting.

“Day for it” is Australian slang that combines approval and momentum, an enthusiastic announcement that conveys "it's a great day to do whatever it is we're about to do, let's get going."

By day 3, the refrain had taken hold across the group. 50+ of us proclaiming "Day for it!" incessantly, until it became the background chorus of the trip.

At the wedding, cockatoos shrieked overhead as conversation moved quickly and rarely paused for explanation, meaning carried less by the words themselves than timing and tone. The rhythm was faster and the stakes felt lower. Everything got abbreviated, softened, or turned into an occasion for teasing.

I spent the whole weekend collecting phrases like a linguistic-ethnographer on assignment.

A few favorites:

There's a pattern beneath the vernacular. Australian slang systematically deflates seriousness. Words get shortened and importance gets trimmed. The language itself seems designed to prevent anyone from taking themselves too seriously for too long.

In college I learned about the Sámi people in northern Scandinavia, who have hundreds of distinct words for snow. There is snow that's good for reindeer grazing, snow that's crusted over and dirty, snow that looks stable but will collapse under weight. Misreading snow can kill you, so the language evolved to make critical distinctions faster and cheaper to process.

The principle generalizes: when a culture gives something a name, that thing becomes easier to see, quicker to recognize, more likely to be noticed at all.

Researchers have tested this directly. Russian has separate basic words for light blue and dark blue, a distinction English collapses into one category. Russian speakers were measurably faster at distinguishing shades that crossed that linguistic boundary. Their brains had been trained, through vocabulary, to see a difference that English speakers have to work harder to notice.

The fancy term is linguistic relativity. The simple version: words aren't just labels for pre-existing thoughts. Words shape which thoughts come easily.

Which brings me back to Australian slang.

American English is optimized for a particular set of experiences. We have incredible vocabulary for ambition, for urgency, for stakes. Everything is a "grind" or a "hustle." We "crush" tasks and "kill" meetings. Our metaphors are violent and competitive. We speak casually about "battles" and "wins" and "leverage."

We're also well-stocked for outrage. American discourse has a rich arsenal of words for moral intensity, political opposition, and righteous indignation.

What we don't have much vocabulary for is deflation. We don't have native words that sand edges down, that make teasing feel like bonding, that grant permission to let something go without first establishing who was right.

Australian slang is full of those words. The whole linguistic ecosystem seems oriented toward preventing escalation before it starts.

I've been pondering all week whether distinct vocabularies might explain something about national temperament.

Americans often describe Australians as "laid-back." We treat it as a personality trait, maybe something about the weather or the beaches. But maybe it's baked into vocabulary.

Maybe “day for it” as a morning greeting puts you in a different cognitive posture than checking your phone for emails and mentally triaging your task list (my default).

I don't think language is destiny. People are complicated, and culture is shaped by economics, history, geography, and countless forces beyond vocabulary. But language is the medium we think in. The words available to us create paths of least resistance. Some thoughts become easy to have while others require more effort.

Americans swimming in vocabulary for intensity and stakes might naturally experience more intensity and higher stakes. Not because our lives are any harder, but because our language keeps serving those frames up, making them the default interpretation.

Clare has been making fun of me all week for saying “reckon” too much. Every opinion now comes with “I reckon” attached to the front or the back.

Borrowing slang from a two-week trip risks sounding like a college student who studied abroad for a semester and won't shut up about it. But I think I will try to keep “day for it” in rotation. There's something in that phrase I want access to… a tiny linguistic souvenir. A way of greeting the morning that scans for possibility rather than obligation.

I think about how many thousands of times I've woken up and immediately started problem-solving. The language of productivity and optimization so deeply embedded that even leisure gets framed as something to maximize. Make the most of your weekend. Take advantage of the time off. Even rest gets wrapped in the vocabulary of extraction.

“Day for it” doesn't extract anything. It just acknowledges: Here is a day. It is suited for something. Go find out what.

Up and to the right.