Re: whinging poms again: (was Re: OT: whinging (was Re: rms on debian : background noise))
On Monday 01 September 2003 23:13, Geoff Thurman wrote:
> Apologies for picking up a dropped thread, particularly when it has
> little (read nothing) to do with Debian, but a couple of things have
> been gnawing away at my mind. I have snipped from various branches of
> the thread:
>
On 2003-08-19 at 11:08, Kevin Mark wrote:
>On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 04:50, Dave Howorth wrote:
>> PS For any yanks who don't know the word, 'poms' is equivalent to
>>'limeys'
>
> > Limeys - saliors eat limes to avoid scurvey
> > POMS - prisoners of mother england
> > equal?
-K
> I don't recall ever hearing this Prisoners Of Mother England thing
> before (although sometimes I don't recall things I was told yesterday).
I've heard that story and it sounds incredibly UNlikely to me. For starters
it would give 'POME' not 'Pom'. But also, it's usually applied (in Oz) to
English immigrants, who obviously (at the stage they were at large in the
colony) were not prisoners, and if they ever had been prisoners, would
obviously have escaped and no longer be such. It's also a term used in NZ,
which never had convicts transported here; it could have been adopted (sans
derived meaning) from Oz, but it's unusual for NZ to adopt anything
Australian voluntarily.
That account of its origin sounds like a rather lame attempt at a riposte to
the jibe levelled at Aussies that *they* were all transported English
convicts.
I must say, though, that I haven't heard any story that sounds remotely
convincing to me. "Limeys" is much more likely, since limes were I believe
known and carried to prevent scurvy; but were pomegranates even known in
those days?
cr
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