?No worries?: how America came to banish Australia?s go-to phrase

A list of "banished words", published annually by Michigan's Lake Superior State University, has this year included the unmistakably Australian "no worries".

LSSU's tongue-in-cheek list has been compiled every year since 1976 from submissions on terms deemed "familiar but problematic". This year's list also includes, among others, "asking for a friend", "circle back" and "wait, what?" for elimination.

While the list takes submissions from around the world, executive director of marketing and communications at LSSU, Peter Szatmary, said "not a single of the many nominators of 'no worries' came from Australia. All nominators of 'no worries' listed their addresses as in the US".

But how did this Australianism get there?

"The same way anything does: use, contact, and time," says Tiger Webb, a language researcher and chair of the ABC's English usage committee.

The first use of "no worries" goes back to a 1965 edition of Sydney's Oz magazine, according to the Oxford English dictionary.

The expression probably received a boost in popularity from Australian cultural exports such as Crocodile Dundee, which Webb says contains six instances, as well as the Sydney Olympics and Steve Irwin.