"payback"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Everybody who's been to enough movies or watched enough TV for the past
twenty-odd years is likely to know that "payback" means 'revenge; an act of
vengeance.'



Fox News and CNN use the word frequently.

Anyway. OED's definition  2a is "_Austral._ The Australian Aboriginal code
or custom of revenge; an act of revenge carried out according to this code."

 Earliest cite is 1935.

1926 Merlin Moore Taylor _In the Heart of Black Papua_  (N.Y.: Robert M.
McBride) 67: One "pay-back" inevitably leads to another, with the roles
reversed. Ibid.171:  "It will not be over until the handcuffs are on the
man who led the pay-back," retorted Humphries grimly.

OED doesn't indicate that this word appears often in novels of the Vietnam
War. Indeed, OED's "1985" ex. was written during that period (unless the
anthologist behind that compilation of various soldiers' letters of the
period was faking it to fool Oxford). Not until 1973 is there an ex. in the
simple sense of revenge (by or against anyone).

At any rate, it seems likely that the recent U.S. use came via Australian
English. Since "pay-back" seems to have been well established in Papua
before WWII, it also seems likely that the word entered American army usage
unoticed in 1942 or 1943 during the New Guinea Campaign, which involved
both Americans and Australians.

If we rule out (always a bad idea) independent invention, it would seem
that it took "pay-back" in its general sense more than twenty-five years
from its likely intoduction to catch on detectably in American English, and
maybe another fifteen or so years to become well established.

(Introduction via Australia after WWII is certainly possible, but I think
that would be at best merely an occasional reinforcement. Beginning in
1942, thousands of slangy Americans were actually in Papua/New Guinea and
had to learn something about dealing with the locals.)

JL

"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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