Hi, really? Don't you have schools up there in Canadia?
'whinging' is one of those strange practices involving pomegranates that gets priests defrocked, and is illegal even between consenting adults in the USA's Bible Belt states. Surgeons on ships taking convicts to Australia used to engage in the practice with the shackled unfortunates in the deep, dark holds. 'pommy' is derived from the name of a particularly notorious ships' surgeon, Herr Doktor Professor Charles Alfonse de Neuville von Pompadour, Bt. He was Chief Surgeon in the Bastille when it was stormed in 1789. After escaping dressed as a wallaby, which the revolutionaries mistook for one of the smaller Bastille rats that had evaded the chef's best efforts, he found a position in His Majesty's Royal Britannic Navy where he spent some years investigating the causes of scurvy. He came close to solving the problem when he settled on grapefruit (French 'pamplemousse', so there's a clue) as a possible cure. But he adminstered them to the sailors at the medically inappropriate end. Grapefruits being particularly expensive and rather too prone to squashing, they eventually found - after much experimentation - that pomegranates are an acceptable substitute. The doctors, that is. Nobody asked the prisoners, but I believe many Aussies still enjoy a pomegranate in the outback. Alternatively, 'whinging' describes the incessant whining, moaning and complaining about trivia that the English are supposed to do. Poms are English people. All Australians think all English people are bastards. So really, just to have a bit of a whinge, the phrase 'bloody whinging pommy bastard' is full of redundancy. It could be reduced to just 'bloody pommy' because all pommies are bastards, and they all whinge. The origin of 'pommy' is obscure. My dictionary thinks it might derive from 'pomegranate' from the colour of immigrants' cheeks. Other people think it's an acronym from Prisoner Of His Majesty. I think Bartleby's explanation sounds plausible: "Shortening and alteration of pomegranate, Pummy Grant, alterations of Jimmy Grant, probably rhyming alteration of immigrant." You go can remove that cheerleader's outfit now... -- Cheers, Bob Friday, January 2, 2004, 4:52:25 PM, you wrote: > Being the font of arcane knowledge that you are, Bob, > What does Pom (or Pommie, or whatever) mean? > What does "whinging" mean? > Just so I don't have to keep thinkiing about Tanya in that cheerleaders > outfit (not that it's a bad mental image, I'm just starting to feel a bit > guilty about it is all). > thanks, > frank
