Bogan

The first Australian English noun to be analysed is bogan, which is defined by TripAdvisor (2011) as an ‘unkempt, slack or messy person or redneck.’ There is no definitive source for the noun bogan; however, the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) tentatively suggests that the noun may be an eponym taken from the surname of the family in the 1889 American short story ‘The Luck of the Bogans’ [bogan, n.] (2015a). The narrative concerns an Irish family living in America whose son engages in antisocial behaviour and is eventually murdered in a fight. It is unclear, however, how the word would have entered the Australian English lexicon from this source. For instance, the first citation of the word, according to the OED Online [bogan, n.] (2015a), was in 1985; therefore, if ‘The Luck of the Bogans’ was truly the source of the noun, one would expect to find evidence that the author, Sarah Orne Jewett, and/or ‘The Luck of the Bogans’ were popular in 1980s Australia or that they had been culturally influential in preceding decades. However, a Google search for ‘“The Luck of the Bogans” AND “Australia”’ reveals only nine results, there is no reference to Jewett's works ever appearing on the Australian curriculum, and, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), no significant adaptation of Jewett's work emerged during this era. In other words, this investigation has been unable to find any evidence to support the idea that Australians in the 1980s began using a word taken from an American short story that had been published almost a century beforehand. Indeed, the Australian Oxford Dictionary simply states that the origin of the noun is ‘uncertain’ [bogan, n.] (2004). However, an interesting theory of lexical formation is put forward on the bogan Wikipedia talk page by Australian Trevor Rose (also known as Tarose.trevor): Rose claims that in the 1980s it was ‘common knowledge’ in his local Melbourne region that bogan was, in fact, an acronym for ‘Boys Of Greensborough And Northern Suburbs’ (Rose, Reference Rose2013). He argues that the acronym was used as a pejorative noun to refer to the young men of that region, who were typically working-class, prone to violence, and who often conformed to a particular dress code of ‘acid-wash jeans and […] flannel shirts’ (Rose, Reference Rose2013). His commentary suggests that bogan then broadened to include working-class people outside of the local region (Rose, Reference Rose2013).

Although this theory is uncorroborated by academic study, if it were true, it would explain why the origins of the noun are so elusive: it originated in a particular Australian English regional sociolect and then diffused out to speakers who were unaware of its original acronymic status. On the other hand, Rose's theory may just be an example of a backronym, where the existing word bogan was redefined by the speech community to refer to the ‘Boys of Greensborough and Northern Suburbs.’ Indeed, Durkin draws attention to the importance of being wary of persuasive but unsubstantiated etymologies, citing the popular myth that the word posh originated as an acronym for ‘Port Out, Starboard Home', a nautical expression which was supposedly stamped on the tickets of wealthy travellers who had requested cabins which would keep them away from the heat of the sun (Reference Durkin2009: 205–206).

Cobber

The second Australian English noun selected from the TripAdvisor article is cobber: ‘friend, mate’ (2011). The OED Online states that it is likely that the noun cobber originates from the dialect word cob, meaning ‘to take a liking to’ [cobber, n.²] (2015b), which, according to the English Dialect Dictionary, was used in the Suffolk region of England [cob, v.2] (Wright, Reference Wright1898: 675).Footnote ³ This borrowing would seem to suggest that Australia saw a large number of settlers from the Suffolk region; yet Suffolk is not included on Jupp's list of the sixteen British counties which saw heavy immigration to Australia between 1788 and 1868 (2004: 27). On the other hand, the first citation of cobber was not until 1893 (Lonergan, Reference Lonergan2005: 6), perhaps indicating that the Suffolk dialect speakers who may have introduced the noun into Australian English did not arrive with the main wave of British immigrants. For instance, Australian farmers in the 1880s were in desperate need of labourers to work on their farms; therefore, they offered assisted immigration to workers (and, under certain conditions, their families) from the Suffolk region of England, who were experiencing an agricultural depression at this time (Jupp, Reference Jupp2004: 55–56). One could theorise, then, that the verb cob was perhaps transported to Australia by the presumably high number of Suffolk labourers who volunteered for the assisted immigration programme. Regardless of how it was introduced into Australian English, it would seem that the word subsequently underwent grammatical conversion and the process of affixation, transforming the verb cob into the noun cobber via the addition of the suffix ‘-er', before it ceased to be used as a verb, surviving only in its variant noun form. Alternatively, the English Dialect Dictionary reveals that cobber was used in the Cornwall region of England to refer to ‘a bruiser of tin’ (that is, a tin miner) [cob(b), v.2 and sb.6] (Wright, Reference Wright1898: 677).Footnote ⁴ A search for the phrase ‘Cornwall Australia mining’ in the digitised library database Google Books reveals that the rise of the tin mining industry in 1840s Western Australia coincided with the decline of mining in Cornwall (Leitner, Reference Leitner2004: 73), events which subsequently resulted in a substantial number of Cornish tin miners immigrating to Western Australia. Indeed, a reference text also found via Google Books states that by 1849 Cornish immigrants accounted for over nine percent of the Western Australian population (Payton, Reference Payton and Jupp2001: 229). It is therefore possible that the word cobber was transported to Australia by Cornish tin miners to describe their occupation, before the noun's use broadened into non-mining contexts in a way that nevertheless evokes the comradeship and friendship which was associated with the Cornish mining community in Australia (Payton, Reference Payton2007: 178).

Sandgroper

The final word to be analysed is sandgroper: a ‘person from Western Australia’ (TripAdvisor, 2011). Sandgroper is a compound of the nouns sand and groper (with groper being the grammatically converted form of the verb grope). In her entry for the noun in the online reference text The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Doyle (Reference Doyle2003) states that the noun sandgroper emerged during the Western Australian gold rush and that it was ‘derived from the tendency to grope with one's toes when walking through soft sand’ (around two thirds of Western Australia is classed as ‘desert’ [George, Reference George, Corrick and Fuhrer2009: 15]). The first recorded use of sandgroper in the OED Online is in personal correspondence from 1896 [sand, n.² C2. a] (2015c [1909]Footnote ⁵ ); however, a search of the Australian digitised newspaper database Trove (2015) reveals a usage of sandgroper from December 1892, four years prior to the OED's first citation. The noun appears in the letters page of The West Australian as the appellation of a correspondent who wants to call attention to ‘the disgraceful state of the footpath in Wellington-street’ (‘Sandgroper', 1892: 6). ‘Sandgroper's' complaint is that the footpath in question ‘consists of at least twelve inches of beautiful sand, and it is quite a treat to wade ankle deep through this sand three or four times a day’ (‘Sandgroper', 1892: 6). As this is the earliest known usage of sandgroper, it is tempting to speculate that this source was perhaps the origin of the noun, with the correspondent (or, indeed, the editorial staff) inventing the neologism to describe how the writer had to grope through sand. However, given the fact that this is a single usage that only appeared in the letter column of a local newspaper, it is perhaps more likely that the writer was using a word that was already in existence, if only in colloquial use.Footnote ⁶

Implications for lexicography

The above examples demonstrate how online resources can be utilised to thoroughly explore the etymologies of colloquial lexical items. However, if any language enthusiast with critical thinking skills and an internet connection can make innovative discoveries about lexis, then what implications does this have for 21^st century lexicography and the status of the lexicographer? Modern lexicography essentially began as a semi-egalitarian process, with the Philological Society appealing for members of the general public to aid in the construction of the OED (or the New English Dictionary, as it was then known): ‘we call upon Englishmen to come forward and write their own Dictionary for themselves' (Philological Society, 1859: 8). Subsequently, volunteers submitted over six million slips of paper (Winchester, Reference Winchester1999: 24) containing quotations which provided the OED with ‘vital evidence of past and present usage’ (Mugglestone, Reference Mugglestone2005: xiv). In other words, members of the general public were invaluable contributors to the OED. Many dictionaries still ask for contributions from the public. Collins Dictionary, for instance, invites ‘anyone’ to submit ‘new words' to be including in their publication (O'Neill, Reference O'Neill2012). And yet, Alex Brown, head of digital at Collins Dictionary, states that only ‘about 10% [of submissions] are probably good suggestions that will go in[to the dictionary]’ (cited in Koetsier, Reference Koetsier2012). So, one must ask, what about the other ninety percent of submissions? All words submitted to the dictionary are studied using Collins' 4.5 billion-word corpus (a representative collection of written and spoken texts), and if the definition of a word is not in wide enough circulation or it has not been in use for a long period of time, then it may be rejected (Koetsier, Reference Koetsier2012). Indeed, Michel et al. estimate that a remarkable ‘52% of the English lexicon’ is not documented in standard dictionaries (Reference Michel, Shen, Aiden, Veres, Gray, Pickett, Hoiberg, Clancy, Norvig, Orwant, Pinker, Nowak and Aiden2011: 177). Therefore, it is clear to see that professional lexicographers and authoritative dictionaries are either unable or unwilling to give a full account of the present-day English language.

Nevertheless, this article has established that thorough and innovative analyses of sometimes obscure or marginalized lexis can be conducted by language enthusiasts who lack lexicographic experience. This being the case, it is possible that the coming years may see a rise in the popularity of crowdsourced dictionaries (that is, dictionaries which are largely written, edited, and maintained by members of the general public), with these ‘amateur’ lexicographical projects perhaps going some way towards recording the 52 per cent of the English lexicon which has been omitted from authoritative dictionaries. Indeed, one only needs to look at the popularity of the online crowdsourced slang dictionary Urban Dictionary to realise that there is already a drive and a demand for dictionaries made by and for the general public. According to the web analytics site Alexa (Reference Alexa2015a), as of October 2015, Urban Dictionary is approximately the 586th most popular website in the world.Footnote ⁷ In comparison, Oxford Dictionaries is the 2,927th, Collins Dictionary is the 6,041st, and the OED Online is the 41,893rd. The internet, therefore, has made it possible for members of the public to produce their own dictionaries which, as illustrated by the case of Urban Dictionary, can rival and eclipse the online editions of even the most authoritative dictionaries. Thus, the status quo in which lexicographers are treated as the ultimate authority on the English language is, slowly but surely, shifting, and linguistic knowledge, power, and authority are being seized by members of the general public.