The Once-Common Australian “Fair Dinkum” Means Authentic, Legitimate, or Truly on the Level

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi. Hi, Martha.

Yeah, so this is Jerry, and I’m calling from the beautiful Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia.

Oh, lovely. Well, welcome to the show, Jerry. What’s on your mind today?

Thank you. About 50 years ago, I was working on a ship, and I happened to work with a bunch of Aussies, a bunch of Kiwis.

And I heard you guys talking about some Australian words the other day.

And I learned a bunch of words while I was with them, which is I used to call it a pipe wrench, but they called it a stilson because that’s the guy who made it.

Wrenches, they call it spanner, adjustable wrenches, they call it shifters.

But my Aussie friends had this phrase, and the phrase was bare dinkum.

I have always wondered where did that ever come from?

Fair dinkum. So what context would you hear this in?

So fair dinkum is something that is absolutely 100 percent authentic beyond any question.

You’re just you’re standing behind it. You’re saying, oh, this is it.

Well, you know, he’s a fair dinkum stand up guy.

Oh, yeah, that’s a classic one.

A fair dinkum Aussie is an Australian of the most ideal kind, right?

Absolutely, and I worked with some of the greatest.

Did you ever hear someone called a fair dinkum drongo?

Nope, never heard anything like that.

A fair dinkum drongo is the worst sort of person, just the worst sort of simpleton.

Oh, okay.

So, yeah, fair dinkum, that’s a classic Australianism.

And as you said, used a little bit in New Zealand by the Kiwis, a classic, classic, classic expression.

It’s two words, F-A-I-R and D-I-N-K-U-M.

And we really should focus on dinkum because other words can appear in front of dinkum.

So you could have straight dinkum or square dinkum as well.

Yeah, I figured out fair.

I figured fair had to be pretty fair.

Yeah, but fair dinkum is the most common one, but square dinkum or straight dinkum.

Dinkum originated in English dialects in Lincolnshire and Derbyshire and migrated with people from those regions to the Antipodes.

And while it fell out of use in England, it continued to be used and grew in use in Australia and New Zealand.

And originally it meant work or share of work.

So saying something was fair dinkum, you meant kind of good job or it’s a well done.

And it’s had a lot of variation and there’s a lot of subtlety in its use in Australia.

But in general, like you said, it means authentic, on the level, legitimate, honest, and it can be used as an intensifier just to emphasize something.

So that’s the fair dinkum truth.

It means that is definitely the truth.

But it’s just its own word or how did it get from old English?

That’s exactly right.

Well, I guess it didn’t change from Old English to anything.

It just means what it means, right?

Yeah, we don’t know.

Its origins are lost in time, but it did come over as a form of dialect from the Old World to the Antipodes.

Oh, I’ll be darned.

And I was trying to tie it into Winky Dink or something like that.

There have been attempts to tie it into Chinese, but it is definitely not Chinese.

It did not come from China.

I just have to be satisfied with that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, call us again sometime. Sounds like a call for a bunch of folks who taught you another whole dialect.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, over the years, you learn a lot of different words.

All right. Take care of yourself and be well.

All right. Thank you very much. Good talking to you. Great. Bye.

Bye-bye, Jerry. You can reach us from anywhere in the world. Go to waywordradio.org/contact to find all the different ways that you can do that.