Is ‘pelican’ an Aussie slang term like ‘boofhead’, ‘drongo’, and ‘drip’?
I have found two examples of it being used in that way.
The first was from Paul Hogan.
The Australian Financial Review tracked down the 86-year-old in California where he now lives.
They told him about Pauline Hanson’s famous National Press Club speech.
Obviously (the Australian Financial Review is a left-wing Nine newspaper) they wanted Hogan to criticise Pauline.
And, only having their account of the speech, he did so.
He called her a ‘pelican.’
Linguistically, what is interesting is the use of ‘pelican’ as an Aussie slang word.
It’s not found in the exhaustive, big two-volume second edition of The Australian Nation Dictionary.
But Paul Hogan has used it before.
In 1986’s Crocodile Dundee movie he tells a New York driver: ‘Get on the right side of the road, ya pelican!’
The second example is from another Australian actor, Russell Crowe, who reportedly tweeted after the Rabbitohs’ 2014 NRL grand final win that one of the club’s sponsors was a ‘pelican’ after he was overhead to back the opposing team (the Bulldogs).
Now, this is a language moment that intrigues me, because the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that ‘pelican’ is indeed a slang word—but it is American, not Australian!
There, it means, apparently, ‘a worthless person; a fool, an oaf.’
It’s recorded in that sense since 1856.
And it is often, the entry adds, prefixed by the adjective ‘old.’
But why pick on the pelican in this way?
In Australia we once called greedy children who stuffed their mouths with food ‘pelicans.’
We would say ‘You are just like a pelican; your mouth holds more than your belly can.’
Was there a similar saying in America?
Is that the source of the expression?
We can but speculate.
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