On Saturday, 1 October 2016 5:41:29 PM AEDT Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Does the metaphor 'scrapheap fire' work? I was aiming for an Oz equivalent to the USA/Canadian slang expression 'dumpster fire', a very common pundit turn of phrase in relation to the Trump campaign.
A dumpster, more properly a Dumpster, is a trademarked corporate term for a particular brand of skip, a large rubbish bin. On, wait, the term _is_ known in Oz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster
Keep in mind that most people outside the US knows much more about US politics than most Americans know about any other country. US politics IS news for us, whatever happens in the US will affect us in significant ways. Our politics isn't really news for you because mostly it doesn't matter to you. Your politicians make the most stupid lies about Australia (and other countries) and hardly anyone notices or cares. Australian news routinely covers US issues. Then we have the issue of news via social media which is dominated by the US because they have a large English-speaking population that has good net access and social connections to Australia. Use the terms that are used in discussions in the US, they will probably be better known by Australians than anything you devise while trying to localise them. Also I think that the term "scrapheap" is more of a British thing, and it's entirely different to a dumpster (see "Scrapheap Challenge"). -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/