Talk:chunder

Rival to etymology 1
I moved the following to talk as it's a rival for etymology 1 rather than a third etymology as it claims. It seems dubious as, as long as our etymology is correct, it was in use before he was born. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:07, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Barry Humphries said in a recent BBC Radio 4 Extra program 1 (at about 1:04:00) that he introduced it with the Barry McKenzie comic strip in Private Eye. He claims that only students from Geelong Grammar used the word. For the comic he invented an origin from a contraction of "Watch Under" used on old convict ships heading to Australia.

Also worth noting Barry Humphries mentions 'chunder' and 'watch under' in a 1987 interview with Clive James.


 * Barry Humphries: Gladdies All Over


 * The link to the Radio 4 programme doesn't work but as Barry Humphries went to Melbourne Grammar School not Geelong Grammar School, according to his Wikipedia page, I assume he claimed in the programme that it originated there. According to World Wide Words, the word chunder first appeared in print with its current meaning in exactly 1950 in Nevile Shute's book 'A Town Like Alice'. As Shute had only just moved from England to Langwarrin, Victoria (like Geelong this isn't too far from Melbourne) earlier in that same year he wouldn't have had too much chance to learn Australian slang but it's certainly possible that he heard a local use a slang word that had recently been coined by Melbourne Grammar or Geelong Grammar pupils earlier in that year, or just a few short years before, which would be when Barry was at Melbourne Grammar (long before he came up with his Barry McKenzie strip in Private Eye in 1964).


 * Of course this is speculative and, even if Barry wasn't joking or misremembering things in this now-vanished clip, it's possible that the pupils of the 1950s were simply using a word that originated many years or decades before that wasn't actually coined by them (perhaps from 'Chunder Loo') or alternatively that it originated as a corruption of the British chunter, the standard English word thunder, or as an imaginative coinage by Shute rather than being Australian in origin. Perhaps the word only took off in Australia due to the success of Shute's book and the word's rise in popularity in Britain since Barry McKenzie (and later the song Down Under and probably episodes of Neighbours and Home and Away) is an example of a reintroduction? Probably the only thing we can be sure of is that the alleged 'Watch under' derivation sounds dubious and was possibly simply a figment of Barry's imagination - he does, after all, mention referring to this claimed etymology in his Private Eye strip in his interview with Clive James above (the link atill works for that). --Overlordnat1 (talk) 03:42, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

RFC discussion: July 2016
Something wrong with Etymology 3: it isn't connected to any actual sense or part of speech. Equinox ◑ 15:41, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
 * It should probably be removed, since the term predates that alleged introduction by a decade and a half. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:01, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

British Usage
Chunder is used in Britain now, at least as a verb. Of course it’s originally Aus, then NZ, but it appears rather anachronistically in ‘The Larkins’, a new British TV series that’s supposed to be set in the 50s, and coincidentally I heard my friend use the word a couple of days later, I doubt she even realised the word had an Australian origin. Due to these facts I’ve amended the regional tag. Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:54, 15 October 2021 (UTC)