Word Stories: stoush

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

I spent Christmas and New Year in Australia and, naturally, I kept an eye out for titbits of Australian English. The American philologist William Churchill once said (in Beach-la-mar, the Jargon or Trade Speak of the Western Pacific, 1911) that ‘the common speech of the Commonwealth of Australia represents the most brutal maltreatment which has ever been inflicted upon the language that is the mother tongue of the great English nations’. That seems a little harsh. For such a relatively small, relatively young country, Australia has developed a vibrant variety of English with a number of interesting aspects.

It can seem on the surface that a large number of the novel terms you encounter are actually ‘just’ diminutive forms of familiar words, albeit possibly with a specific local meaning: schoolie (school leaver), truckie (truck driver), arvo (afternoon), rego (car registration number), for example. Occasionally, though, you come across a term that stumps you. This happened to me with a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, referring to the recent battle for the leadership of the Labor Party: Labor Stoush Intensifies. It obviously meant something like ‘conflict’, but I’d never seen the word anywhere before.

The OED has stoush (also spelled stouch) as a verb and noun, meaning ‘fight’ and ‘fighting’, respectively, and labels them ‘Austral. and N.Z. slang’. It is suggested there that the origins may lie in a Scottish dialect word, stashie (quarrel, uproar). Sidney J. Baker in The Australian Language (1966) agrees with this and adds that the word became prominent in the 1890s and was then spread by the ‘diggers’ (Australian and New Zealand private soldiers) during World War I. In fact, that conflict became known as the Big Stoush, until another bigger stoush came along. Baker also provides a few other derivatives of stoush, such as stoush-merchant (fighter, bully) and put in the stoush (fight using unfair methods).

One final amusing snippet from Baker that I noticed while flicking through: he refers to a term for schoolteacher, guzinter. This is from the habit maths teachers have of asking how many times two ‘guzinter’ (goes into) six, for example.