Idioms are, if not the bread and butter of language, then certainly the cracked peppercorn or a similarly exciting condiment. We use them all the time.
But unless English is your second language, it takes a special type of mind to unpack the weirdness behind many of the common sayings of Australian English. Precisely because idioms are so common, most minds process their nonsensicality (the bee's knees, the cat's pyjamas) almost automatically.
Dressing for my first day of school, my sisters kindly informed me that being as flash as a rat with a gold tooth did not, in fact, mean that I resembled a rodent.
As our family boiled in a beach car park waiting for a spot to be vacated, I was surprised to learn that the places was not full, but chockers. Dressing for my first day of school, my sisters kindly informed me that being as flash as a rat with a gold tooth did not, in fact, mean that I resembled a rodent.
Did you know Books and Arts is also a podcast? You can subscribe Books and Arts on iTunes, ABC Radio or your favourite podcasting app.
My childhood was also haunted by an unusually well-meaning spectre: that of Larry, as in as happy as. Everyone in Australia seemed to have met this Larry character, and had all independently found him to be an extraordinarily upbeat fellow. As I met Lawrences and Laurents in primary school—all of whom seemed quite dour—I began to idly wonder whether I'd ever meet this ur-Larry, ever come to behold his beaming visage.
You can imagine my surprise when I learnt that there was no Larry. 'Why on earth,' I began, presumably petulantly, 'do you all say it, then?'
An etymological mystery
There are few three-word phrases that keep lexicographers up at night as much as of unknown origin, but that's exactly where the Australian National Dictionary Centre falls on as happy as Larry. It hazards a guess at 'an arbitrary partial rhyming reduplication' with happy, which seems rather strange to mine ear.
The phrase first pops up in New Zealand in 1875, where Harry Orsman, editor of the New Zealand Dictionary of English spotted it in the writings of one George Llewellyn Meredith. Meredith, a prominent Launcestonian who spent time in Auckland engaging principally in agricultural pursuits, is reported to have written the words 'we would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats.'
Orsman, the dictionary editor, supposed that Larry was a stand-in for one of two other words: larrie, a word of Clydesdale origin meaning a joke, or larrikin, a well-known Australian term for a cad. We can probably safely rule out the latter: as Melissa Bellanta notes in her history of larrikinism, the term was pejorative through much of the 19th century. Larrikins, then, were not particularly happy—on account of being frequently incarcerated.
A fighting chance at the phrase's origin
There is another theory about why we say as happy as Larry, and it suggests an eponymous source: Larry Foley, a man described by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as a 'pugilist and contractor', and in one obituary as 'a popular citizen and old-time champion boxer'.
Foley was a truly remarkable fighter—undefeated in his time, once lasting over 70 rounds in a fight before police intervened—but whether he was particularly happy is another question. Most interpretations base this on the substantial payout for his final fight: over one thousand pounds. There are even apocryphal reports of a newspaper headline—HAPPY AS LARRY—being the source of the phrase.
The Macquarie Dictionary has the first Australian citation of happy as Larry from a Tom Collins novel in 1905, some 30 years after Foley's retirement from boxing: 'Now that the adventure was drawing to an end, I found a peace of mind that all the old fogies on the river couldn't disturb. I was as happy as Larry.'
Sad news for historical Larry-seekers
Trove, that fantastic digital repository of information whose funding is under threat, has two usages that predate the career of Larry Foley and would rule him out as any kind of etymology for the happy as Larry saying.
Bruce Moore, editor of the Australian National Dictionary, has contended that it is exactly the anonymity of expressions such as happy as Larry that lend them their particular potency.
Regardless of its actual origin, the phrase fits a well-established idiomatic pattern in English: as X as Y.
In this sense, as happy as Larry is very similar to as smooth as butter, or as good as gold, or (my personal favourite provincial slur on the British capital) as sure as the Devil's in London.
One reason that happy as Larry may have stuck around since its pre-Federation origin is that it was use extensively in World War I and RSL missives. As Moore has noted, the First World War had a 'profound effect' on the lexical inventory of Australian English.
Beyond neologisms (digger, Aussie, plonk all record their first use during the war) it's no large stretch to see how existing Australian or New Zealand terms might have been used as a way of solidifying Australian (or ANZAC) linguistic identity on the front, and cherished thereafter by those that returned.
Subscribe to Books and Arts on iTunes, ABC Radio or your favourite podcasting app.