Sunday Word: Larrikin
larrikin [lar-i-kin]
noun:
1 (Australian English) a boisterous, often badly behaved young man
2 a person with apparent disregard for convention; a maverick
Examples:
Cleaver Greene, the fictional cocaine-snorting, alcohol-swilling, lovable larrikin lawyer from TV’s Rake is hardly a conventional poster boy for Victoria’s courts. (Tammy Mills and Adam Cooper, Leave it to Cleaver: Richard Roxburgh to front court education videos, The AgeDecember 2021)
Constantly on television, the cocky larrikin with a penchant for drinking and womanising had been the preferred prime minister in opinion polls long before he entered Parliament. (Steve Evans, Albanese channels Labor legend with A Better Future campaign, The Sydney Morning Herald, December 2021)
Soaring over them all is the larrikin; almost archly self-conscious - too smart for his own good, witty rather than humorous, exceeding limits, bending rules and sailing close to the wind, avoiding rather than evading responsibility, playing to an audience, mocking pomposity and smugness, taking the piss out of people, cutting down tall poppies, born of a Wednesday, looking both ways for a Sunday, larger than life, sceptical, iconoclastic, egalitarian yet suffering fools badly, and, above all, defiant. (Manning Clarke, quoted by Graham Strahle, Does Classical Music Need More Aussie Larrikins?, Music Australia, January 2017)
"They're like the larrikins of the forest. They get excited. They get a bit high on the sugar load. They scramble around amongst the branches, and they love wild weather." (Steve Evans, Rare swift parrot lands in Canberra, The Canberra Times, May 2021)
Origin:
'street tough, rowdy,' 1868, Australia and New Zealand, of unknown origin; perhaps somehow from the masc. proper name Larry. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
Larrikin is a quintessentially Australian term. It appeared in the 1860s for a street rowdy or urban tough. The writer Archibald Forbes described the larrikin as 'a cross between the Street Arab and the Hoodlum, with a dash of the Rough thrown in to improve the mixture.' Vicious fights between larrikin gangs were common. In the late nineteenth century some gangs formed a subculture with a dress style that included broad-brimmed hats, gaudy waistcoats, strapped moleskin trousers and high-heeled boots.
Early suggestions of its origins were fanciful. The obituary in the Melbourne Argus in 1888 of a police officer named James Dalton said that he had accidentally invented it in a court hearing through a mishearing of his saying larking in his broad Irish accent. This was countered by a letter in a later edition, which argued that it was instead from leery; the writer said it had became a catchword of Melbourne youths in the 1860s from its appearance in a popular London song, The Leery Cove. Locals started to call the boys leery kids, which was transmuted over time into larrikin. A related story of the same period was that criminals in local jails described themselves as leery kin, which was similarly amended through the Irish brogue of their jailers. Kin was also invoked in Larry’s kin, the supposed relatives of some unknown Australian. This has been linked to another Australianism, happy as Larry, recorded first around the same time as larrikin. The supposed connection with Irishmen in two of the tales has led to some writers on language declaring larrikin to be an Irish word.
We can dispose of all of these stories at a stroke by looking across the Tasman Sea. Larrikin is recorded in New Zealand in 1866, two years before Australia. There can be little doubt that the word had a common origin in the old country. The English Dialect Dictionary has larrikin as a dialect term of Warwickshire and Worcestershire for a mischievous or frolicsome youth. It would seem to have become significantly modified in sense during its journey to the Antipodes.
In modern Australian English, larrikin has been inverted into a term almost of respect. The old sense of a tearaway or hooligan has been replaced by that of a non-conformist and irreverent person with a careless disregard for social or political conventions, someone who may be thought truly Australian. (World Wide Words)