The Official Cellar T-Shirt Sale

[OnyxCougar]

I'm not going to be able to make it to forks, as I feared, so I'll be waiting for private contractors (USPS) to steal them....

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yes, Forks.

[jaguar]

If it's going to be more than another fortnight I need to change the address.

[lumberjim]

fortnight.....uh, 14 days?

boy, how long will shipping to wherever the hell you are take?


actually, that is a good point......its been so got damnlong....anyone else need to update their address, please PM me.

jag, i'll contact you when i know when i'm shipping it to you to check the address.

[lumberjim]

the eagle has landed. I repeat...the eagle..has...landed.


they look great. i'll get a pic up tonite when i get home

[richlevy]

I got mine from Jim tonight. Two black long sleeve tee shirts. OK, so I ordered one long sleeve black and one short sleeve navy, but I've got them.

Thanks Jim.

[lumberjim]

not to worry, rich.....i'll see that you get your short sleeve t...for free....

[Sun_Sparkz]

How Exciting!

I cant wait to see how they turned out.. we all have to post our pic with the tshirt on!!

.... ok maybe not, i'm just excited!!

[richlevy]

Originally posted by Sun_Sparkz
How Exciting!

I cant wait to see how they turned out.. we all have to post our pic with the tshirt on!!

.... ok maybe not, i'm just excited!!

It's too bad you're so far away. I'm wearing mine to Plastic Forks, or I will be changing into mine when the sun goes down. We'll be wearing our shirts, eating burgers and bangers on the barbie (my attempt at Aussie talk), and having a great time.

I'll be posting pictures next week.

[wolf]

Oooh yes!! Bring 'em to Forks!!

By forks rules, I shall be wearing a moose tee shirt for the actual day of party, but will, of course don a cellar shirt for official photo op moments!

[lumberjim]

i'll get better shots in the daylight, but here's the front:

[blue]

Good god, what happened to your shoulders man?!

[SteveDallas]

"forks rules"?

I thought there were no rules!

[jaguar]

Good god, what happened to your shoulders man?!

my thoughts exactly.

eating burgers and bangers on the barbie (my attempt at Aussie talk)

That's awful, the word you're looking for is snags, bangers is a pommy term.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by jaguar

my thoughts exactly.

That's awful, the word you're looking for is snags, bangers is a pommy term.

Well, it's a slow day and I've finally had time for my favorite pastime, which is fact-checking, trivia-searching on the Internet. I was curious about the 'pommy' term. I understood that it meant 'British', but I could not figure out why. My first thought was pomegranate, but I couldn't figure out what that had to do with 'British'. Lime juice for preventing scurvy and 'Limey' were something I guessed at a while back.

POM
[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?”
[A] 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. You could have added a possible derivation 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. 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).
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.