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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
