I'd recently been advised that, along the lines of 'When in Rome', if I wanted to get better service in this country, I should whinge like a pom. Since this piece of advice was given to me, on two separate occasions, by two English persons, I was slightly taken aback. I always thought 'whinging pom' was a derogatory term and I've read some hoo-ha about the word 'Pom' being an insult, but apparently it's not any more, or at least, not here. So I was curious; Where does the word 'Pom' come from? And is it an insult or not?
So I looked it up.
The word 'pommy' is actually yet another piece of Antipodean slang. It is (believe it or not) a contraction of the word 'pomegranate'. Why pomegranate I hear you ask? It's rhyming slang.
Pome-granate / Immi-grant.
Pom is a derogatory term for a recently arrived (English) immigrant. But of course!
The Oxford English Dictionary refers to a 14 November 1912 edition of Australian newspaper, The Bulletin which includes the statement; “The other day a Pummy Grant (assisted immigrant) was handed a bridle and told to catch a horse.”
So it is an insult of sorts, but seems to be loosing it's power. It may still be an insult in Aus, but here, it's become part of the popular culture, or so it would seem. Strange but true.
1 comment:
Seems that nobody knows the exact answer, you're right!
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pom1.htm
It's probably just one of those things that caught on and doesn't mean much, in the same way that we refer to Americans as Yanks (although try calling someone from the Southern states a yank and they'll quickly correct you).
Shortened descriptions for peoples' nationality or race are a tricky one: I remember being taught that of all the various names circulating, "aborigine" was the polite name for Australia's indigenous people. Then years passed and it turned out that aborigine was not acceptable and that "aboriginal" was the correct name. I've just read now that it's "indigenous Australian".
A lot of national "nicknames" for me came from watching the cricket as a kid, and it's interesting - out of the cricketing countries I was made aware of as a child (Aussies, Kiwis, Pakis, Poms, Windies), 2 aren't considered an insult, 2 are, and I've no idea about the last.
My understanding/experience is that Pom was generally not used as an insult; more that it was just a less formal description of a person based on their background, and whether it was meant insultingly was based more on context. Certainly "Whinging Pom" is an insult, as it compounds the trait of complaining a lot with the idea of being from England.
With regard to having to complain to get better service - I firmly believe that this is a product of service companies paying absolute threadbare minimum wage to employees such that they only want to do the bare minimum amount of work to get by, and in the main the easiest thing for them is to get you out of their face quickly: unless you can identify them at a later stage then your complaint will most likely be handled by someone else anyway.
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