Friday, 14 August 2020

Word To Use Today: pomiculture.

 The Australians call the British Poms or Pommies. The contempt embedded in the word is reasonably friendly and so, as far as I know, no one minds.

What the Australians think of pomiculture I'm not sure. 

I have to admit that the British do have various bits of culture about the place, but mostly we try to pretend they aren't there. Sometimes we pretend that the stuff isn't actually culture by giving it a silly name (like the concert series called The Proms, for instance (yes, all right, Pom Proms); or by letting our artists starve in desperate poverty (children's writers); or by putting it in a big house miles from the nearest railway station/town/road (opera).

Mind you, having said all that, some Australians will know that pomiculture is actually to do with growing fruit.

File:Jack fruit tree 01.jpg

photo of a jack fruit tree by Biju Karakkonam

But then they lose out on some fun.

Word To Use Today: pomiculture. Pōmum is the Latin for apple or fruit, and culture comes from the other Latin word cultūra, a cultivating, from colere, to till.

Pom meaning British person may derive from pomegranate (because British people in Australia tend to suffer from sunburn, or because it's rhyming slang for immigrant) or it just may be from an acronym: Prisoner Of Mother England. Other explanations for the word's origin involve the British pom-pom gun and the nickname of Portsmouth, Pompey, which was for a long time the chief port of the Royal Navy. But nobody's sure.



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