swag

I was reading an article titled World Englishes and Lexicography. The opening paragraph explained the notion that a variety of English that was supported by a dictionary was much more likely to be generally accepted than one that didn’t have this basic reference tool.  This is true although unfair.  Think of the vibrancy of Indian English which still doesn’t have its own dictionary.  And Singaporean English.  Somehow the dictionary makes the variety visible and socially acceptable.  This was our experience with the Macquarie Dictionary and Australian English.

So the writer, Fredric T. Dolezal, an American linguist quoted me:

Butler makes the point that an author who “is carried along by the tide of American English” has much more latitude “to parade a swag of words” from her dialect (in this case a writer of the Newfoundland dialect) than a writer “struggling in the small (but lively) tributary of Singaporean English,” who Butler says “has to argue a case just to use horn as a verb” (that is, “...horned him loud and long”). Undoubtedly, swag of words is underwritten by a dictionary entry.

And indeed swag of words is supported by the Macquarie Dictionary and I discovered, to my surprise, that this is an Australianism.

The origin of the word swag lies in Old Norse where it had the general idea of a swaying or undulating motion.  The verb follows this path, but the noun develops the swaying movement to a bulge, and so to a bag or a big blustering fellow (both meanings obsolete).  It then adds a wreath, a drapery, a subsidence in the ground to the meanings before arriving at a thief’s haul. At this point it becomes an item in the underworld slang that was introduced into the colony at Sydney.  It was recorded by our convict lexicographer, James Hardy Vaux, in his dictionary of the Flash Language. He also covered the sense of a swag of something being a great quantity of it.

A swag of any thing, signifies emphatically a great deal. To have knap'd a good swag, is to have got a good booty.

This expression has been used consistently in Australian English from then on. It is perhaps regarded as colloquial but only mildly so.

It was a great surprise to me to realise that a swag of something was an Australianism though it makes the writer’s point that I could inflict my variety of English on the world without a second thought because my kind of English was in a dictionary. The Singaporean writer is not so fortunate.