![]() A bit more reading later, and I realised that it’s an incredibly ubiquitous term for a person of Canadian origin, and as with Kiwi, is more often than not a positive label. I’m going to be honest with you, I hadn’t really heard the term Canuck being applied to Canadians much until I started reading travel blogs, and I noticed some of the bigger names in Canadian travel blogging labelling themselves with this term. That therefore was Kiwi, first the bird, then the people, then the fruit. This happened back in 1962, and the name has stuck pretty much ever since, with a quarter of the world’s Kiwi fruit production being in New Zealand. Once the term Kiwi was in common parlance and associated with New Zealand, rebranding the Chinese Gooseberry – as the Chinese native Kiwi fruit was originally known – in order to ship more of this product was almost inevitable. You are probably also wondering, having named both a bird and a people with this term, surely a fruit was going a bit far? Well, it turns out that this was all just a marketing ploy. Perhaps having the name associated with both a unique national symbol and the armed forces has meant that it has been widely and proudly adopted in New Zealand as a way to identify oneself as being from New Zealand. To start with it only referred to those people in uniform, but by the end of the second world war it had become associated with pretty much everyone from New Zealand. The Kiwi bird, a national and easily recognisable symbol of New Zealand, features prominently on the New Zealand armed forces symbols, and it was from this that the nickname arose. It turns out that in the case of the Kiwi, the bird came before the person, which in turn came before the fruit. Because if I’m going to be labelled a Pom, I need to know why! While I was there, I thought I’d look up some other commonly used nicknames for nationalities, and see how they originated. Where did the term originate from, and why is it in such popular usage? And why is it deemed an acceptable name to call oneself, whereas Pom is not? Naturally, I assumed the answer was to be found on the internet, so to Google I turned. And unlike the term Pom, Kiwis are more than happy to refer to themselves as such. Enjoy!Ī Kiwi, depending on the subject being discussed, is a bird native to New Zealand, a fruit that is grown in New Zealand, or a person that comes from New Zealand. Today’s article is a bit of holiday fun which answers a question that has been nagging at the back of my mind for a while now and I decided needed answering.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |