#POMMIE MBWENGE SKIN#
The older term of Jimmy Grant, meaning immigrant, became Pommy Grant as the Australian sun allegedly turned immigrants′ skin pomegranate red.įolk etymologies also exist, for example: contraction of pomegranate, rhyming slang for immigrant (“imme-granate”). British person): Australian from 1912.Whatever your beliefs about this one, what seems to be true is that the term is not especially old, dating from the end of the nineteenth century at the earliest, certainly not so far back as convict ship da.
The pomegranate theory was also given some years earlier in The Anzac Book of 1916. Later pommy became a word on its own and was frequently abbreviated still further. An immigrant was at first called a Jimmy Grant (was there perhaps a famous real person by that name around at the time?), but over time this shifted to Pommy Grant, perhaps as a reference to pomegranate, because the new chums did burn in the sun. He suggested that the word began life on the wharves in Melbourne as a form of rhyming slang. H J Rumsey wrote about it in 1920 in the introduction to his book The Pommies, or New Chums in Australia. It is now pretty well accepted that the pomegranate theory is close to the truth, though there’s a slight twist to take note of.You will note that he had to explain the pronunciation that we would now take to be the usual one: in standard English it used not to have the first “e” sounded, with pome often rhyming with home. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood ‘thins down’, by their round and ruddy cheeks. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country.
That origin was described by D H Lawrence in his Kangaroo of 1923: “Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Part of the reason for all these theories growing up is that there was for decades much doubt over the true origin of the expression, with various Oxford dictionaries, for example, continuing to say that there is no firm evidence for the pomegranate theory.According to World Wide Words, the theory about the pomegranate seem to be the more credible one, its real origin remains unclear for this outdated term:
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