The Feel of a Word: rort

We are again grateful to James Hardy Vaux, our first dictionary writer in Australia, for recording the way in which the underworld of London, and then the convicts in Sydney, used the verb to work.

Vaux’s entry reads:

WORK.  To work upon any particular game, is to practise generally, that species of fraud or depredation, as, He works upon the crack, he follows housebreaking, &c.  An offender having been detected in the very fact, particularly in cases of coining, colouring base-metal, etc., is emphatically said to have been grab’d at work, meaning to imply, that the proof against him being so plain, he has no ground of defence to set up.

This underworld use follows on from the mainstream use of work meaning ‘to systematically go through (an area) in the pursuit of business’.  The innocent activity of selling goldfish might have been described as to work town and country on goldfish.   Substitute  pickpocketing for goldfish and you have the convict use.

Turn the sentence around and you have Town and country were worked by salesmen (or pickpockets).  But in the early 1800s the past participle wrought (as in wrought iron) had much greater frequency than the past participle worked.  The reverse is true now.

A person who wrought a scam was a wroughter.  Somewhere in the late 1800s, early 1900s,  the spelling changed to rorter in both Australia and the UK,  except in the case of the racecourse wroughter where, perhaps because it was part of a  compound, it became fossilised.  Similarly wroughting became rorting. From rorter the noun rort was derived, and then in the early 1900s so was the verb to rort, meaning to engage in a scheme to take advantage of a system or practice.  You could rort your expenses, or unemployment benefits, or the tax system.

It didn’t take long for rorting to become entrenched in Australian politics so that we think of the natural homes of rorts as being in the political system.  You can rort the vote by branch stacking.  A particular rort that pops up from time to time is the one in which politicians go travelling overseas  on the taxpayer’s money for some spurious reason.

We share rorts, rorters and rorting with New Zealanders but it has to be said that Australia has made rorting its own.

We should not confuse this rort meaning ‘a swindle’ with  rort ‘a wild party’ which is a backformation from the British English adjective rorty meaning ‘wild and boisterous’. The origin of rorty is not clear but is thought to be a variation on roary meaning ‘loud’.  A person is rorty if they are dissipated, a drink is rorty if it is intoxicating.  It all adds up in Australian English of the 1940s to the rort or party.