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There is a particular sort of slang phrase I hear frequently in promotions on Australian youth music radio station Triple J and absolutely nowhere else: lines like "get across the latest new music", "This Summer has a bunch of cool concerts! Get amongst it!", "get around this new single" etc.

"Across", and "around" seem to be used interchangeably, with "get across/around this" = "learn about this". "Amongst" is possibly more literal eg "get amongst this concert" = "be amongst the people at this concert".

Attempts to google these usages just got me dictionary entries about getting across bridges or ideas etc. I couldn't find anything in the text promotions on the Triple J site, either, so I might be misremembering the exact wording used.

Has anyone else encountered this kind of slang? Is/was it ever actually common amongst (Australian?) young people or does someone working in the triple J advertising department just have an odd way of speaking? Or have I just been living under a rock?

It doesn't bother me, I think it's kind of cute, I'm just curious.

Based on a dream, after trying to get my head around Chinese and Japanese name usage, and vaguely inspired by Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand.

A society doesn't gender anyone by default, in formal language. Gendered terms like "she" or "daughter" exist, but are only used for someone the speaker is on close personal terms with. Using gendered words/pronouns for someone is vaguely equivalent to using someone's given name in Japanese, switching to informal pronouns in German/French etc. Except without the "you can refer to subordinates informally" thing.

Or maybe with that, depending on whether you want to make a less ungendered society or one that's just as gendered as ours but in a different way.

Because I found the ungenderedness of the Radch interesting but the idea of No-one Having Gender made me a bit dysphoric, and I've been pondering how you could have a society that doesn't gender by default but still HAS gender.

It's possible I've seen this elsewhere and forgot!

EDIT: Comments have made me realise I was being a bit lazy with my thinking. There's really two related ideas here:
1) a language where gendered terms are only used for those you're close to etc.
2) a society where people are not treated as having any particular gender unless you're close to them etc.

A society like 2 would plausibly use a language like 1 (or a language that doesn't gender anyone at all), but a language like 1 would not necessarily imply a society like 2.

So I'm reading this book "Stuffed and Starved" about global issues with food and stuff. I'm a few pages in and he says "most farmers have few options, especially those in the Global South (the term I use in this book to refer to the world's poorer countries)."

And I am completely thrown out of the book and have to stop reading. The global south? So, what, Australia is a poor country now while all our neighbours to the north are rich? Did he just assume none of his readers were from this side of the planet? I understand semi-redefining words that have ambiguous meanings which almost say what you want them to (the other option being making up totally new words that people will forget the meanings of) but south isn't ambiguous! It's a neat geographical division!

Well, except for "The Deep South" etc. So I guess it's a relative term.

But it's not like people make generalisations about The East and The West that..oh wait. Huh. And those seem totally natural to me, despite being much more ambiguous (West of where?) and making even less sense (Nigeria is exactly as "West" as Germany, after all)

Language is funny innit? :) (I still don't like the term but I'm sure I'll get used to it)