Transcript of “Fossicking and Bandicooting”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Debbie Four.
Where are you calling from, Debbie?
New Jersey.
New Jersey. Welcome to the show.
Well, my grandmother used to always say the word fossicking whenever we were rummaging around and digging in the dirt and basically just, you know, hunting anything. And when I asked her about it, she had said that she’d always heard that from her relatives, and our family comes from, like, Great Britain. And I was wondering if you could tell me something about that term and why would she use that term?
Fossick, F-O-S-S-I-C-K, fossick. That’s a good instinct that it comes originally from the UK, although where it became really popular in the mid-19th century was Australia and New Zealand. In Australia and New Zealand, at mining excavations, after they’d been depleted, people would just go in and fossick about. They would just see if there was anything left. And in fact, it’s a really cool hobby and a cool activity in Australia, especially today, to go and look for pieces of garnet or opal or sapphire or topaz and a number of other minerals that you can find there. And so the word fossick came to mean looking around in those old excavations for things. And then it more generally came to mean to search about or to rummage around like she used it. And I mentioned that the origin is probably from the UK itself. It’s kind of murky. It may go back to a dialect term fossick, which means to bustle about or to fidget. But it certainly got popularized in Australia and New Zealand by people who were fossicking about. And today I love using the term fossick to refer to what I do with dictionaries. You know, sometimes I’m just fossicking about in the dictionary looking for a word I don’t know.
Oh, that’s great.
Yeah. That Australia-New Zealand connection reminds me that there’s a syndrome for it, which is very Australian, and it’s bandicooting.
Like bandicoots.
Yeah, bandicoot is a little marsupial. And it has this foraging behavior. It digs around looking for roots and insects.
Yes, they’re very endangered, yes.
And so just like with fossicking, bandicooting also is used for humans who dig around looking for something.
Oh, that’s funny.
All right, well, take care of yourself.
Bye, Deb.
Happy fossicking.
Thank you.
Take care.
We know you’ve been fossicking and bandicooting around the Internet looking for answers to your language questions. 1-877-929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada. Or you can find a dozen other ways to reach us if you’re somewhere else in the world on our website at waywordradio.org.
