I'm goaded into answering this because the word has - almost - come up in the news.
The
Guardian today reported on a speech by former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd. Speaking of the relationship between China and Australia, and a 2017 speech by one of his successors as Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull, he said:
You want to pick the day when the relationship went, in my judgment unnecessarily, down the gurgle [sic], it was that day, so just be judicious about when you embark upon public language.
The "sic" was inserted by the Guardian, alluding to the fact that the usual expression is
down the gurgler, that is, down the drain.
(This isn't the first time Rudd has struggled with Australian idioms. When he was prime minister he used the phrase "fair shake of the sauce bottle" - three times in the one interview. Many people pointed out that the usual expression was "fair suck of the sauce bottle".)
The phrase
down the gurgler seems to have originated in the 1980s. An example from the
Canberra Times in 1989, quoting then Minister for Science Barry Jones:
"In 15 to 20 years time, we will be well and truly down the gurgler unless business leaders take a more original approach," he said.
If the word
gurgler only ever appeared in the stock phrase
down the gurgler, I'd be reluctant to accept it. But the Shorter Oxford also give a broader sense: "a person who or thing which gurgles". And the colloquial usage is occasionally varied. For example: "Hopefully the whole boilin' of' em will now slide down the well earned gurgler"; "all of them going down the double-dip recession gurgler".
So I'm adding
gurgler as a rare word.
