What is the origin of the word "Poms" as in the Aussies vs the Poms for the Ashes? I've read and heard a couple of different trails of thought.

Quayoui

Australia was a penal colony and prisoners from England were shipped out to the colony. Now I'm not sure if they had POM on the back of the shirts or not but it stood for Prisoner of Mother England. I think Perfect Original Male sounds so much better for the record Apr 08 09, 11:18 PM

madkeen4

Aussies abbreviate anything and everything, POM or POME is short for Prisoner Of Mother England. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pom Apr 08 09, 11:19 PM

phaeton_nz

POHM = Prisoner of Her Majesty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_words_for_British#Pommy Apr 08 09, 11:22 PM

Flamis

There are numerous theories, but it appears that this one may be lost to history. I'd always heard that it stood for "Prisoner Of her Majesty", but this appears to be entirely apocryphal. Wikipedia has "According to British Naval records the term "Pommie" came about from the red "pom-pon" on the top of the hats of British sailors who were involved in the transfer of prisoners to the Colonies." which is one I'd never heard of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_words_for_British#Pommy Apr 08 09, 11:23 PM

looney_tunes

"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) strongly supports the theory that pommy originated as a contraction of 'pomegranate'. The OED also suggests that the reason for this is that pomegranate is extinct Australian rhyming slang for immigrant; it cites an article from 14 November 1912, in a once-prominent Australian weekly magazine The Bulletin: 'The other day a Pummy Grant (assisted immigrant) was handed a bridle and told to catch a horse.' A popular alternative explanation for the theory that pommy is a contraction of "pomegranate", relates to the purported frequency of sunburn among British people in Australia, turning their fair skin the colour of pomegranates.However, there is no hard evidence for the theory regarding sunburn." There are many back-derivations offered, as is often the case for a word or phrase that achieves wide acceptance. Different groups of people relate to different stories, and all agree to use the word or phrase - this is a phenomenon commonly seen by etymologists. The link offers a range of other common suggestions about Pommy/Pom, all plausible! I prefer the OED as an authority, myself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_words_for_British Apr 09 09, 12:36 AM

Baloo55th

Note from Baloo: Whenever a disputed origin is alleged to be from an acronym, it won't be. Acronyms are in the vast majority very modern in their use. Anything from before 1920 at the earliest is almost certainly not an acronym. There are people who seem to take delight in inventing acronym origins for perfectly ordinary words such as golf and a certain rhyme for duck. Unfortunately, the internet gives a platform for these things because people looking things up rarely check what they find. (Not referring to the regular crew here on the whole, although even they can sometimes be fooled in their own special areas!) It's hard to reference a negative, but see snopes for their comments on some of these. Apr 09 09, 2:05 PM

zbeckabee

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. That origin was described by D H Lawrence in his Kangaroo of 1923: “Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood ‘thins down’, by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told”. 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. 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. H J Rumsey wrote about it in 1920 in the introduction to his book The Pommies, or New Chums in Australia. He suggested that the word began life on the wharves in Melbourne as a form of rhyming slang. 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. Later pommy became a word on its own and was frequently abbreviated still further. The pomegranate theory was also given some years earlier in The Anzac Book of 1916. 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. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pom1.htm Apr 09 09, 5:04 PM