Word Stories: pom

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

Further to last month’s column on Australian English, one of the more depressing aspects of spending time there over the winter was the thrashing that the Australian cricket team doled out to England. An advertising campaign, backed by sponsor Ford, caused some controversy with its slogan, ‘Tonk a Pom’. Some people objected to its blatant anti-English message, a few said with racist overtones. But where does the word pom come from?

Tonk means ‘strike’ or ‘defeat’, and seems to be onomatopoeic, something like the sound of a cricket ball on a cricket bat. In fact, the oldest illustrative quotation in the OED is from a cricketing context: ‘Wanting four to win, I fairly tried to tonk the leather.’ A.A. Milne, Day’s Play.

Pom is a little more problematic. Let’s dispose of the less likely ideas first. One theory is that it comes from P.O.M.E., Prisoner of Mother England, a reference to the convicts transported to Australia in the nineteenth century. It apparently appears in some early immigration records and carved on some cell walls in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Another suggestion holds that it comes from Port of Melbourne, where ships arrived carrying British immigrants, while others suggest it derives from Permit of Migration, from pommes de terre (potatoes), or from pompey, the nickname of the British port, Portsmouth.

The most likely explanation involves a bit of word-play on immigrant. This was, in slang, altered to jimmygrant, recorded from 1845, often shortened to jimmy. Imagine a boatload of English jimmygrants coming over from the motherland, sunburnt and red-cheeked from the voyage, and allow a bit of poetic license in the rhyme, and it’s not too big a leap to see how they came to be referred to as pomegranates, shortened to pommies or poms.

The word pomegranate itself derives from the Old French, pomme grenate, ‘apple with many seeds’, the second word coming from Latin granatum. The same root gives us grenade (hand-thrown explosive device), which is what the ball must have seemed like to English batsmen facing Aussie fast bowler, Glenn McGrath.