fair dinkum?

[Stephen Goranson]

"Origin unknown" for "fair dinkum," according to OED--and to me too. Here, merely a few notes, questions, and perhaps an antedating. Since it appears in the English Dialect Dictionary (and others) and was known at about the same time in Australian writing (circa 1888-1890), some proposed it originated in England but became popular in Australia. The movement of people was more in that direction than the reverse. (The collocation left little or no trace in 19th-century US.) But, as far as I know (feel free to correct me), the earliest secure attestations are in Australia, which do not prove it started there, but might at least keep the question open.

Since it is an obvious place to look, I may not be the first to find uses in Trove, the Australian newspaper database. The following 1879 use may be written up somewhere (is it?), but isn't in OED, the Australian National Dictionary, etc. I haven't checked Green's, or Butler's Dinkum Dictionary 3rd ed., etc. (anyone care to?). Liberman's etymology bibliography lists only one dinkum article (which adds little); Notes & Queries has several late notes, the most memorable being a claim to have heard "fair dinkum" from a Lincolnshire farmer in 1848-9--but that claim was made over fifty years later, so is somewhat iffy.

  Australian Town and Country Journal (New South Wales) Saturday 30 August 1879 p 33:
    ... Morning Gallops. The work on Randwick last Saturday was almost of a purely sensational nature, and everything that put in an appearance did really serviceable work. The following are the principal items :- Mabel, the up-country mare, was sent what is known as "fair dinkum".... [sent by heart, grace, or the jockey?]

Several other appearances follow (e.g., a horse, Blue, "doing the fair 'dinkum'" in Jan 1880; the early uses appear on the sports pages, in rowing, for example). Besides the already-known variant spelling dincum, we may note a goofy Nov. 1898 retelling in which Moses asks "Straight dingkum?" In the likely not really related but I'll mention anyway department, HathiTrust has an 1830 text, Humane Policy: Or, Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements Essential....by Saxe Bannister (p. lxxxii), which tells of a chief named Dingum, in New South Wales, a name said to be "nearly equivalent" to "'I of myself' or 'I am'."

Also of doubtful relevance is the 1862 Copperhead ("peace Democrat," pro-slavery) poem (in the Ohio newspaper The Crisis June 18 and reprinted in other papers and in 1863 Copperhead Minstrel) in which "Dinkum Darkey" takes a room in Uncle Sam's hotel, at the expense of whites. An earlier racist song oddly mixes anti-black and anti-Chinese words, calling the latter "din cum darkey." (See: Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music...2005 p. 42.) One folk etymology claims Chinese spoke (in Cantonese) of din kum, good gold, during an Australian gold rush. Among other probable nonsense coincidences are sing-song syllables (though dinkum could turn out to be fake Latin?), e.g. the Dec. 9, 1876 Once a Week story: "When I carry grog bottle, um allus seem to laugh inside, and go dinkum, dinkum, 'till I 'bliged to pull de cork out and smell um, and den I taste, an' him all ober wid me."

As promised, I did not give the dinkum origin, whether in the sense of work or of genuine, reliable, etc.  Can we find the origin, fair dinkum?

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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