Re: whinging poms again: (was Re: OT: whinging (was Re: rms on debian : background noise))
On Tuesday 02 September 2003 11:02 am, cr wrote:
> 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
'The pomegranate is one of the earliest cultivated fruits. Historical
evidence suggests that man first began planting pomegranate trees
sometime between 4000 B.C.E and 3000 B.C.E.'
(From http://www.pomwonderful.com/history3.asp). Why the E?
It also seems that the apple in the garden of Eden might 'in fact' have
been a pomegranate, in which case it does go back rather a long way. I
accept your point though; this doesn't prove they were widely known in
this part of the world. I've spent a few minutes on google and can find
no support for the anti-scurvy theory, except that the fruit provide
lots of water and are nutricious.
Geoff
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