Why ‘rooting’ means something different to Australian ears

“Forgive the crassness of my query,” wrote Eden Sandwell, and instinctively, my ears pricked up. “I’m reading Lonesome Dove (the classic American novel set in Texas after the Civil War), and a character named Lorena talks about Jake “wanting a root…”

Ginseng, maybe? Mandrake? Not a chance, as Lorena works at the bordello, and there’s no mistaking the context. Eden added, “I’ve tried in vain to find other American examples. All this time I thought it a quintessentially Aussie expression, while Americans only use root meaning to barrack for a team.”

In the US, Swifties were rooting for Travis. Not here. Credit: AP

A book-sweep backs Eden’s hunch. Across US media, fans are either rooting for teams, while Robert Downey Jr is rooting for Dominique Thorne, the young star of Iron Heart, a Disney spin-off of Downey’s own Iron Man. Elsewhere, companies are rooting out racism, or farmers, kudzu vines.

Prepositions spell the difference. Beyond Australia, you either root for – or root out. You don’t root full-stop. Even in Britain, the sexual connotation is lost. Proof lies in a viral Instagram confession from February this year, when an expat English tradie and his father-in-law (also a Pom) visited a Brisbane tip.

Eager to scavenge, the pair pointed to a rubbish pile, asking council workers whether they could “have a quick root over there?” Um, said the staff. Probably not a good idea, fellas. “Besides mate, there’s cameras.” Somehow, in one verb, Cloughy the tradie went from son-in-law to “toy boy or something”.

Eric Partridge, the godfather of slang, called root “the great Australian verb, corresponding in all senses, physical and figurative, to the British f---”. And Eric should know. For all his years in the UK, the Kiwi was schooled in Toowoomba from 1908, where rooting was common as muck.

Beyond Australia, you either root for – or root out. You don’t root full-stop.

That said, the word took its time to become official. Associate Professor Amanda Laugesen, author of the bad-language bible Rooted (NewSouth, 2020), claims the sexual sense emerged around 1940. Though back then, rooted was more likely to mean exhausted, linked to routed: wasted. Knackered.

Soon the noun denoted penis, echoed by the comic novel, They’re A Weird Mob (Ure Smith, 1957). John O’Grady, writing as Nino Culotta, warned new Australians, Americans included, that root has a “fundamental, biological, extremely vulgar application”. Not enough to faze locals who soon entwined the taboo into root rat, rootability, root ute (a shaggin’ wagon), and Wellington boot: the rhyming offshoot.

All well and good, but how did root end up in Lonesome Dove? That’s a mystery. Larry McMurtry wrote his cowboy saga in 1985. The action itself is set in the 1870s. How a sex-worker called Lorena gained an Aussie shag in transit is something only Larry could answer, the writer taking to his final bed in 2021.

At least the mystery of rooting (US barracking) is easier to answer, but not entirely. Debate surrounds two theories. One relates to cattle, where rout is a quaint synonym of bellow, deriving from Latin rudere (to roar). Yet the stronger lead links to wrotan, Old English for dig, just as we root out lantana, or truffle pigs root for treasure.

Dr Gerald Cohen, a slang sleuth based in Missouri, fancied the earthy idea, “perhaps with the imagery of stamping so hard that one is visualised as digging a hole.” Just like the hole that Cloughy the English tradie had to dig for himself to go hiding in a Brisbane tip.

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