Australians are doing the English language better than any of the rest of us. I once heard one of them refer to “eating gas station food” as “smashing a dirty servo bite,” and from that point on I was absolutely sold on their perfect dialect. Recently, though, I discovered another type of automotive word that Australians are doing perfectly: Car crashes.
In Australia, you don’t get into a boring old fender bender. You have a bingle, or depending on your region, perhaps a prang. Those are way better than anything we say out here, and I think we need to adopt them immediately across the rest of the English speaking world.
Sure, “fender bender” rhymes in a pleasing way, but “prang” comes from old RAF slang. “Bingle” is even better, evoking the antics of one maia arson crimew and its Sprigatito-assisted hacktivism. Both are just more fun to say, both for their uniquity in American society and their fun little vowels.
We need more fun in our day to day lives, and what better way to inject joy into bad situations than to adopt Australian slang for our car crashes? Effective immediately, no one in the U.S. of A. is getting into a single other fender bender. From here on out, it’s all bingles and prangs.