On Monday, 3 October 2016 12:40:56 PM AEDT Trent W. Buck 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.
Short version: Australian English has no direct analogue of the US/CA idiom "dumpster fire". We'd understand "train wreck", "clusterfuck", & "complete cock-up".
We also don't use the term "French fries" to refer to chips apart from in McDonalds. It's rather silly to try and invent new terms for American slang. We all see news about America, most of us see American news on occasion, and almost everyone sees Hollywood movies.
I have *never* seen a fire in any of them. Setting fire to rubbish is probably illegal, at least in urban and suburban areas. It'd probably wreck the skip, too.
I've seen puddles of plastic from people burning wheelie bins on a number of occasions. I've seen metal bin enclosures in the CBD showing signs of fire damage (replacing the plastic bin inside is much easier than replacing the paint that was burned off), and I once saw a wheelie bin on fire inside a metal enclosure in the CBD.
(Possibly the waste is properly incinerated after collection & before landfill, but I wouldn't bet on it. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill#Restrictions)
Incinerating waste safely is not easy. There needs to be some combination of extremely high temperatures and filtering to avoid carcinogenic smoke.
We also don't (AFAIK) have that thing where the homeless have a "trash can fire" for heat. Probably just because our winters are milder. About 0.5% of Australians are homeless.
With the increasing numbers of people sleeping on the streets of the CBD we will probably have trash can fires next winter. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/