I read these terms about English and Americans in another thread. What are they and how long have they been around? How did they come around?
LOL Australian slang: Seppo / Septic tank - an American (rhyming slang for yank). Pommie / Pom - English person (usually whinging pom).
POM has been around since 1772 precisely. Seppo, it depends, what came first? The septic tank or the term yank? Whenever both existed simultaneously, Seppo was about 0.23 seconds behind.
So the old Cockney Rhyming Slang is still a living mechanism for word formation in Australia? Or did you folks pick up that one word from the Brits? E.g., "bread" for "bread and honey" = "money," one of the few that made it across the Atlantic. We also adopted the slang for "facts" but we got it wrong, saying the whole thing, "getting down to brass tacks" instead of just "getting down to the brass." The whole point is to make it a code by eliminating the rhyming word!
Limey originally referred only to British sailors. The British Navy discovered that carrying a supply of lime juice on every ship and adding it to their daily ration of watered down rum prevented scurvy, which was eventually found to be caused by a vitamin C deficiency. What a fortuitous bit of horticultural geography that they didn't end up being Grapefruities or Kumquatties. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And to this day a drink of rum with lime juice is called Navy Grog. I suspect it's only in America that the term was expanded to all things British. I'd refrain from calling a stranger in London a "Limey," until I was sure it would not be as big a faux pas as calling an American civilian a G.I.
Yeah, but in fact nobody in America is a Yankee except New Englanders. The Confederates began misusing the word to apply to all Union soldiers regardless of their state of origin, and today their great-great grandchildren even apply it to us Californians. So they can hardly complain when what goes around comes around. They're not Yankees but we're not either. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
