AUSSIE WORDS

LARRIKIN

The Australian word larrikin was first recorded in 1868 in the sense ‘A young urban rough, a young hooligan or thug, especially one who is a member of a gang’ (the emphasis being on ‘young’: middle-aged larrikins were no longer larrikins, they were just simply ‘thugs’). Thus, when the term first appeared in the nineteenth century, it was very negative. The Age(Melbourne) tells us in 1870: ‘A gang of "larrikins" ... had been the terror of Little Bourke-street and its neighbourhood’; and in 1879 the Australian Monthly Magazine(Sydney) thunders: ‘About six years ago, a gang of "larrikins" took a servant-girl to the North Shore in a boat. She was violated by the party.’

Larrikins, we are told further, were as much recognisable by their get-up as by their behaviour. (Nothing changes! This went for ‘bodgies’ and ‘widgies’ too, if you are old enough to remember!) Thus a writer in 1890:

The larrikins can be considered as the thugs of Australia. ... They are generally known by their peculiar style of dress—the broad-brimmed, low-crowned felt hat, the coat dotted with buttons in every conceivable spot, the tight-fitting bell-bottomed trousers, and the heels of the boots, which are disproportionately small. There were also larrikinesses, the female associates of larrikins. In 1898 the Bulletintells us: ‘The larrikiness eats fried fish in bed, and when her larrikin wakes up in the morning he finds he has been sleeping on the bones and the stopper of the vinegar bottle’.

Well, where does this Ozword come from? E.E. Morris in 1898 (Austral English: A Dictionary of Australian Words, Phrases, and Usage)records a folk etymology which, he says, was believed by ‘99 persons out of 100’ at the end of the nineteenth century:

It is a phonetic spelling of the broad Irish pronunciation, with a trilled r,of the word larking.The story goes that a certain Sergeant Dalton, about the year 1869, charged a youthful prisoner at the Melbourne Police Court with being ‘a-larrr-akin’ about the streets’. The Police Magistrate, Mr. Sturt, did not quite catch the word—‘A what, Sergeant?’—‘Larrikin’, your Worchup’. The police court reporter used the word the next day in the paper, and it stuck. Morris adds: ‘This story ... unfortunately ... lacks confirmation; for the record of the incident cannot be discovered, after long search in files by many people. Mr. Skeat’s warning must be remembered—"As a rule, derivations which require a story to be told turn out to be false".’ By the bye, W.W. Skeat (1835-1912) was an English lexicographer and philologist.

Other derivations abound. It has been argued that larrikin comes from thieves’ slang, a combination of leery (or leary) (meaning ‘wide-awake’, ‘knowing’) and kinchin (meaning ‘youngster’); thus a ‘kinchin cove’ is a ‘young boy’ (or larrikin). So (the argument runs) leary kinchin could very easily have blurred into leary kin and thence blurred further into larrikin. Persuasive? Undoubtedly. The trouble with this theory, however, is that we have no record whatsoever of leary and kinchin being used together.

Another theory is that larrikin derives from French larron meaning ‘a thief’ + kid. This stretches credulity: to put it simplistically and avoid the sophisticated linguistic arguments, why should the perfectly understandable ‘kid’ be changed by speakers into the more opaque ‘kin’? And so the theories proliferate. One of my favourite ‘implausibles’ is that larrikin is a blurring of the Irish leprechaun ‘a small, mischief-making elf or sprite’.

The most plausible provenance of the word lies in British dialect. Larrikin is in very good company in this regard, since an astonishing number of our Aussie slang terms derive from British dialects. There is evidence from the mid nineteenth century, in places such as Warwickshire and Worcestershire, for the word larrikin itself, not just a variant of it, the word meaning ‘a mischievous or frolicsome youth’ (English Dialect Dictionary,ed. J. Wright, 1898-1905). This meaning is somewhat at a remove from the early Australian meaning ‘a nasty young thug’ (but of this, see below). There is little doubt, I believe, that larrikin does come from British dialect. In Yorkshire, there is also a verb to larack about as a variant pronunciation of to lark about, ‘be up to youthful mischief, etc.’: Goas laracking abart ower mich fur my fancy[‘(He) goes laracking about over much for my fancy’] (English Dialect Dictionary).It is likely, therefore, that the real origin of larrikin is as in the Irish policeman story (although our Irish policeman is undoubtedly a furphy), with this salient difference: the transition from ‘larking’ to ‘larrikin’ happened not in Oz but in England.

An interesting feature of the word larrikin is that in recent years it has entirely lost its early pejorative connotations. One of the UK editors of the soon to be published New Oxford Dictionary of Englishasked us last year about their definition of the Australian larrikin: they had tentatively defined the word as ‘hooligan’. We replied that this was certainly one of its original meanings, but no longer. (By the bye, we have marked larrikin in the sense ‘hooligan’ as obsolete in The Australian Concise Oxford English Dictionary3rd edition 1997). When a number of drunken louts invade the pitch of a one-day cricket match (as they did last year in a match against South Africa) we call them hooligans, but certainly not larrikins.

The term larrikin came to be used affectionately of a person who did not always adhere strictly to polite social conventions; a bit of a stirrer. It was used in political contexts as well—used positively as a term almost of endearment. The negative meanings gradually died out completely in Australia, and the larrikin came to be seen as someone who defied social or political conventions in an interesting and often likeable way. Thus as early as 1899, the Truthnewspaper reports: ‘Nowadays the Premier is the chief political larrikin of the House’. And in 1968 the Nationnewspaper writes of

the peculiar character of political leadership in Australia, with its recurrent tendency to throw up two major personality types: the larrikin, represented on this occasion by Mr. J.G. Gorton, and the prima donna, by Mr. E.G. Whitlam. Prime Minister Paul Keating was certainly a ‘larrikin’, I think, in spite of his penchant for antique French clocks. Interestingly, these positive connotations seems to have co-existed with the negative in the nineteenth century—as early as 1870 Marcus Clarke in Goody Two Shoeswas able to write, ‘He’s a lively little Larrikin Lad, and his name is Little Boy Blue’.Nothing pejorative about that!