Though I myself agree that this theory doesn't have a great amount of factual substance or logic. I think this theory may have been used to convey across what residents of Australia (i.e long-term convicts or their descendants) thought of new convicts to the country. Therefore, I'd like to state that I am most grateful for your inspiration for me to research a quite interesting topic. If I remember correctly, you had posted something which declared that you believed only Australians/New Zealanders had the right to label British men as 'poms' and although it is likely that you were simply joking, the thought materialised in my mind: what is the actual origins of the term? Whatever your beliefs about this one, what seems to be true is that the term is not especially old, dating from the end of the nineteenth century at the earliest, certainly not so far back as convict ship days. The pomegranate theory was also given some years earlier in The Anzac Book of 1916. Later pommy became a word on its own and was frequently abbreviated still further. An immigrant was at first called a Jimmy Grant (was there perhaps a famous real person by that name around at the time?), but over time this shifted to Pommy Grant, perhaps as a reference to pomegranate, because the new chums did burn in the sun. He suggested that the word began life on the wharves in Melbourne as a form of rhyming slang. H J Rumsey wrote about it in 1920 in the introduction to his book The Pommies, or New Chums in Australia. It is now pretty well accepted that the pomegranate theory is close to the truth, though there’s a slight twist to take note of. You will note that he had to explain the pronunciation that we would now take to be the usual one: in standard English it used not to have the first “e” sounded, with pome often rhyming with home.
Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood ‘thins down’, by their round and ruddy cheeks. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. That origin was described by D H Lawrence in his Kangaroo of 1923: “Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Part of the reason for all these theories growing up is that there was for decades much doubt over the true origin of the expression, with various Oxford dictionaries, for example, continuing to say that there is no firm evidence for the pomegranate theory. All of them except your last two, I have to tell you, are folk etymology (which, for some reason I’ve never understood, loves to invent origins based on acronyms). You could have added a possible derivation from Prisoner of Mother England, from the common naval slang term for Portsmouth, Pompey, or from pommes de terres for potatoes, much eaten by British troops in World War One, or an abbreviation for Permit of Migration. Response last updated by looney_tunes on May 15 2021.Q) From Rosemary Wetherall: Is pom short for Port of Melbourne (where the ships docked), Prisoners Of her Majesty, as they were convict ships, or did we all really look like a cargo of pomegranates when we caught the sun? Or is it simply rhyming slang for immigrant?Ī) You’ve done a great job of listing many of the explanations that one comes across for the origin of this Australian term for British immigrants. The use of the word 'Pom' may be considered mildly derogatory - some may use it to cause offence, but it is also used in other situations as a friendly derogatory term among people who know each other well, if one of them is English and the other Australian.
ORIGIN OF POMMIE SKIN
A more likely etymology is that it is a contraction of "pomegranates", a red skinned fruit, which bears a more than passing resemblance to the typical pale complexioned Englishman's skin after his first few days living under the hot Australian sun. None of these explanations bears up under scrutiny, and the use of acronyms is largely a late twentieth century phenomenon. A number of fake etymologies have sprung up, mostly along the lines that POM is an acronym for "Prisoner of Mother England" or somesuch, referring to the fact that the earliest Australian settlers were convicts, sentenced to transportation. The term Pommy for a British person is commonly used in Australian English and New Zealand English, and is often shortened to Pom.
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