The tour of Sydney Opera House was splendid but for such an icon of the Arts, I was surprised by the sloppy use of English displayed on the signage at the Cloakroom.
The tour requires visitors to lodge larger backpacks in the Cloakroom – all very reasonable; one doesn’t want to stumble about the place bumping into gap year students with packs the size of Yorkshire replete with billycans and that ‘must have’ didgeridoo. However, rather than the signage saying something like ‘please deposit/lodge/place’ or at a push ‘check in’ large bags, it says “cloak bags larger than A4”. Now call me pernickety but this not only requires a visitor to have a passing acquaintance with metric paper sizes but also be in possession of technology that I last understood to only be available to the Klingons and the Romulons – not members of the Federation. I was tempted to place the now famous Tatonka pack under my cloak to see if my literal interpretation was acceptable – but not having a cloak and having a wife who told me to behave, I didn’t.
The following day it was suggested that the term ‘barracking’ came from the army garrison in Australia who originally played at the Sydney ground and were known as the ‘barrackers’ (so used to shout a bit) – a noun migrating to a verb. So maybe in a decade we’ll all be ‘cloaking’ our packs and coats (or even our cloaks). 
