When I was about eight years old, I took to greeting everyone I met with a bright “g’day!” This was not surprising given, having grown up in pre-property boom Port Melbourne surrounded by factory and dock workers, I already had the accent of a miniature Paul Hogan character. It was, however, abhorrent to my English grandmother, who passed on the message to my parents that I was beginning to sound “like a dingo”.

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Living in America some two-and-a-bit decades later, I would think of my late grandmother whenever my harsh Melbourne vowels, alien to the ears of coffee jockeys throughout the Land of the Free, meant that my Starbucks order came back daubed with “Clam”, “Glynn” or “Clum”.

So it was with considerable amusement that I read the explosion of chatter about the alleged origins of the Australian accent this week. Dean Frenkel, a public speaking expert, wrote in the Age:

Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns. For the past two centuries, from generation to generation, drunken Aussie-speak continues to be taught by sober parents to their children.

(It got worse from there: “It is possible that our national speech impediment is a symptom of inferior brain functioning.”)

Like a match tossed onto a brandy-soaked pudding, the internet lit up, apparently thrilled by this news that all Australians were, evidently, close linguistic relatives of Sir Les Patterson and the Rubbery Figures’ tinnie-smashing puppet of John Elliott.

While the theory was greeted with much delight back in the “mother country” (the Daily Mail and Telegraph picked it up with particular gusto), there was just one problem: the claims were “complete nonsense”, according to language and linguistics blog Superlinguo, and “absolute rubbish” in the words of Queensland university linguistics expert Dr Rob Pensalfini.

Those responses were echoed by Crikey’s Fully (Sic) team, who issued an obliteration of the claims (provided by a range of experts) so comprehensive it brought to mind a “FATALITY!” from Mortal Kombat: “Deriding differences in how some folk speak Australian English as ‘speech impediments’ is absurd,” John Hobson, linguist and lecturer in Indigenous education at University of Sydney, said.

To suggest they are indicative of ‘inferior brain functioning’ belies a breathtaking level of cultural self-hatred, as does the absolutely astonishing claim that alcohol consumption, historical or otherwise, is somehow implicated.

Indeed, Frenkel’s piece – and the follow-up interviews he conducted on the topic – seems less concerned about the fascinating ins and outs of linguistics than it does a sort of “Disappointed Dad” routine about how badly we’re doing in an imagined public speaking competition. Is Frankel “negging” the entire nation? Has he heard the accents of some of this country’s most fearsome intellects?

This “theory” about the sozzled nature of our colonial beginnings joins a considerable list of similar ideas about why the Australian accent (itself a shaky notion, since “Australian” accents can vary even within the suburbs of cities) may have evolved the way it did. From “Australians never move their top lips” to “settlers kept their jaws clenched so as to keep flies from flying into their mouths”, most have been revealed to be, well, about as grounded in fact as the enduring legend of the drop bear. The short answer as to why Australian English, in a broad sense, sounds the way it does is “it’s complicated” (which is, it must be said, not a very Australian thing to say) but it’s basically a mix of the cockney, Irish and other accents from early colonial times.

The continued implication that alcohol (or, for that matter, alcoholism) is somehow uniquely Australian is something I – a person who feels a bit sleepy after a single Pimm’s cup – have long struggled with. As you can imagine then, this week’s global glee at the alleged linguistic inheritance left to us by hard-drinking forebears went down about as smoothly as a cup of cold sick.

After all, we have far more fascinating linguistic traits: our way with a colourful metaphor (“face like a bucket of smashed crabs”, “head like a hatful of cat’s arseholes”) and our world-beating and poetic grasp of profanity, employed by even the country’s finest wits. Indeed, it was both of those – not any habit of speaking, in Frankel’s words, as though “one third of our articulator muscles [are] always sedentary as if lying on the couch” – that Americans found the most fascinating.

When I returned to Australia after two years in Los Angeles, I left behind American friends who’d learned to tell their “mates” they’d see them “in the arvo” and who had studiously increased their usage of certain unprintable expletives – and not a drop of booze was spilled in the teaching.