I was surprised that someone of Victor Mair's broad and deep erudition was unfamiliar with mozzie ("Magic grass of queerness", 7/26/2013). So for other Americans who have not been following the adventures of our Commonwealth cousins in developing the nickname-like vocabulary items known technically as hypocoristics, here's an attempt by the Australian branch of McDonald's to join the club:
An amateur (but apparently well-informed) attempt to explain the principles of Australian hypocoristic formation can be found here. Some more professional references (including a couple of reactions to the Macca's ad):
Jane Simpson, “Hypocoristics of place-names in Australian English”, in P. Collins & D. Blair (eds.), Varieties of English: Australian English, 2001
Roland Sussex, "Australian hypocoristics: putting the -ie into Aussie", Australian Style, 2004
Sarah Chevalier, "Nicknames in Australia", Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée, 2004
Jane Simpson, "Hypocoristics in Australian English", in Bernd Kortmann et al (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia reference tool, 2004
Dianne Bardsley & Jane Simpson, "Hypocoristics in New Zealand and Australian English", in Pam Peters et al., (eds.), Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English, 2009
Dianne Bardsley, "The Increasing Presence of Hypocoristics in New Zealand English", New Zealand English Journal, 2010
Evan Kidd,, Nenagh Kemp, and Sara Quinn, "Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics", Language Sciences, 2011
"How Australians use hypocoristics", La Trobe University podcast, 7/19/2011.
Donna Starks, Kerry-Taylor Leech, & Louisa Willoughby, "Nicknames in Australian Secondary Schools: Insights into Nicknames and Adolescent Views of Self", Names: A Journal of Onomastics, 2012
"Is 'Stevo' not Aussie enough for the new Macca’s ad?", Fully (sic) 1/10/2013
"Are we talking Aussie?", Fully (sic), 1/24/2013
There is a also a detailed description of the formation of new English words by clipping, and by embellishment of the clipped result, in pp. 1634-1636 of CGEL. Many of the examples in that section are Aussie hypocorries, and in particular there's a discussion of the semi-regular pattern of intervocalic voicing between the clipping and the embellishment suffix: "mosquito" has [s] but "mozzie" has [z], "Australian" has [s] but "Aussie" has [z] (despite the spelling), "costume" has [s] but "cozzie" has [z], etc.
Update — For some evidence that automatic speech recognition is not yet perfect, here's the automatically-generated transcript from that Macca's YouTube video, compared with the true transcript — the alignment is so unclear that I'm not sure how to calculate the word error rate in a fair way:
0:00 his guest of the embattled reasonable little maya pen and mom with the ankle
0:04 biter resign from ten elena brown from arena image in the land with the
0:08 visiting reliance on bag from the marriott body in the mean with bette
0:11 midler recent palestinian hope balancing winning
0:15 just talk
0:17 misguided fellas
0:18 they still have the list
0:20 dusty in less than ten times and writers and actors
0:23 but there's only one finds on the win
0:26 detracts
Here’s Gazza the ambo who’s pulled an all-nighter.
Nan and mum with the ankle biter.
Stevo from Paddo on a break from a reno,
havin’ a chinwag with the visiting relos.
Back from the Murray are Hoddy ‘n’ Binny,
with pav McFlurries ‘n’ towin’ a tinnie.
Porko ‘n’ Simmo in a ute that’s chockers.
Best behaviour fellas: these two are coppers.
Yep, there’s Jimbos ‘n’ Bennos ‘n’ Rachs ‘n’ Ackers.
But there’s only one place on earth where you can get Macca’s.
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