In my vocabulary, yarn has always been a verb — it’s the act of having a conversation. My aunty is, in my dad’s words, “always on for a yarn”. The last time I was home in regional Victoria, I ended up talking with the old bloke who owns the town’s carwash and, as I left, he called out “thanks for the yarn! Get home safe!”
But, in recent years, it’s felt like every time I jump online and read a new story, article, breaking news item, profile, literally any type of digital media piece, I’m confronted with invitations from every media producer from Bondi to Fitzroy to please read their “yarn”. I cringe every time.
Something is happening in this transition that kills all the fondness and familiarity for me. When did the meaning change? And why exactly is it so frustrating?
‘Herewith a yarn’
120 years ago, Australian author Miles Franklin began the pitch for her debut novel with the words “Herewith a yarn…”. By this reckoning, a yarn is a fictional story or a narrative piece of some kind — or at least, that’s what it meant in 1899.
According to ABC linguistic expert Tiger Webb, it’s a classic case of what linguists call “semantic shift” (“when some words start to mean something else”).
“Yarn is a pretty generic example of it, really: you get a generic noun that’s existed since the 11th century — yarn, used for any spun fibre used in weaving — and by the 17th century, ‘yarn’ develops an industry-specific noun sense, referring to one of the single threads that are tied together to make rope.”
“[Then we got] this New Zealand/Australian noun sense of ‘yarn’ by itself to mean a story or tale. These are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as colloquial.”
It’s not really our word though. Merriam-Webster suggests that the earliest print evidence of the phrase is from the early 1800s, used in both American and British English. They agree with Tiger in the understanding that the term came out of the sailing world, with sailors using rope (rope — yarn — spinning a yarn). Given modern Australia was founded by convict settlers who sailed here from the UK, it would make sense we picked the term up along the journey.
Tiger takes it further though, explaining why it is Australians feel such strong possession of this word, in the same way we do “bloke” or “mate”. “In the Australian context, ‘yarn’ does have quite a lot going for it. Throughout the 19th century, you see various sense of ‘yarn’ used in quintessentially Australian publications: Punch, The Sydney Bulletin.
“These senses of ‘yarn’ also pop up in the work of distinguished authors: Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson, or Patrick White. There are also inflected and phrasal forms of the verb (‘yarning with’, ‘yarn up’), that are specific to Aboriginal Australian Englishes.”
Strewth!
These days “yarn” is closely tied to people in rural Australia and the outback… as well as the media class, many members of which have never set foot in regional Australia.
As a media degree holder who spent years at an Australian university, and years further spent working in the arts, not-for-profit, and government sectors, I have never once heard someone use the word “yarn” in the way it’s now being used by my colleagues — nor with such frequency by anyone I know in rural Australia.
In 2018 BuzzFeed Australia even launched a social vertical named for the term. BuzzFeed Yarns was purportedly designed to tell stories that relate to Australian people: “from viral news to big time investigations, our nation is built on monumental stories”.
Tiger agrees that the term’s recent popularity with a younger, metropolitan audience is slightly jarring. It’s a fact that has been sporadically debated online, recently by writer Eleanor Robertson who argued it was about relatability and a lack of media diversity. “I think [she was] right to locate this in a context where a rarefied class of media producers are under pressure to seem relateable to an imagined audience they are divorced from in any real sense.”
“[But] this is hardly the first debate about authenticity and the Australian vernacular we’ve seen. If you think Pedestrian shouldn’t write ‘gronk’ in headlines, I have terrible news for you about Banjo Patterson.”
Indeed, the word wouldn’t be out of place on a website like The Beetoota Advocate — an Australian parody of small-town papers. Its founders, Archer Hamilton and Charles Single, have taken on the monikers Clancy Overall and Errol Parker and get around in Akubras and RM Williams, always in “character”. They run the site (and their PR firm) from their offices in Alexandria, Sydney — both having moved from rural Queensland.
Where The Beetoota Advocate is a parody (that some argue is patronising), the larger media landscape doesn’t act as a character study of small-town Australia in the same way. Youth website Pedestrian frequently employs the use of the words “gronk” and “yarn” without intending to be a cynical send-up of rural Australia. I don’t see the team behind BuzzFeed Yarns employing the term as a joke either.
Of course it’s fraught territory to wade into, to say that only people from certain areas of a certain class are “allowed” to say words. As a wealthy white media producer who lives in Melbourne’s inner suburbs I am happy to concede that, despite my family’s country roots, I am not a true-blue person of the people anyway. But I still find something confected and self-conscious about it all.
Are “yarn”, “gronk” and “strewth” just touchstones of our culture, appropriated to reclaim the cringe Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin (Crikey!) left us with? Or is BuzzFeed the Punch of our time; Pedestrian the Sydney Bulletin of the millennial age? Maybe “yarn” is just a goddamn annoying word I should mute on Twitter.
What do you make of Australian media’s love of “yarn”? Send your thoughts to boss@crikey.com.au.
Nothing like a good yarn. Can do without strewth if I have to. Never heard of gronk – am I too old for that one?
Well actually it’s a noun the way you use it and define it. Sorry to quibble.
Seconded.
I’ve not come across ‘yarn’ in media usage. But I detest nouns such as ‘gift’ & ‘incentive’ being turned into verbs ie: gifted, incentivised. Godawful corporate speak, not to mention awkward.
Agree; ‘gifting’ is taking over. You can’t just ‘give’ something any more. I suppose gifting sounds both pretentious and portentous. Won’t be long before we hear ‘She gifted me a Big Mac’. Obviously another horrible Americanism, like ‘couple hundred’. Eaaacch.
There’s more where those came from. Somehow the plainer way of speaking always fails against the more pretentious.
Why did ‘methodology’ replace ‘method’? Why do things have ‘epicentres’ when they used to just have ‘centres’? What was so bad about the old verb ‘try’ that it had to give way to ‘trialled’? How did ‘eventuate’ replace ‘happen’?
Please include “pre-order” on your list, along with “pre-warn” and “pre-book”. Other abominations include “usage” for “use” (noun) and, in AFL commentary, a “secondary” bounce of the ball by the umpire when the first bounce results in the ball not being cleared into open play.
Or the very best of them all: pre-prepare.
And of course don’t forget “double check”.
How do you feel about a ‘learning’ meaning a ‘lesson’?
Seems to be the norm nowadaze.
Or, instead of contacting someone, you now “reach out” to them.
Yes, and instead of saying something, you now “share” it. Sets my teeth on edge.
This to Robin who seems to have been deprived of a reply button – irregardless we should not misunderestimate people who just wish to ensure that their prepreparations are usefully utilising the root – paro– i prepare.
At least that might ensure that they produce a product which would be a new innovation.
(Both abominations appear regularly in Crikey.)
Yes I agree. But I do not apologise for quibbling – “.. a media degree holder who spent years at an Australian university” should know the difference between a noun and a verb. (‘yarning with’, ‘yarn up’) are the only two examples in this paper of yarn being used as a verb.
Strewth, I feel the same way every time I see or, worse, hear “jump on line”!
Rebecca Varcoe insists “In my vocabulary, yarn has always been a verb…”. She then defines it as “the act of…” and gives examples where yarn is always preceded by either the definite or indefinite article; so it actually looks like yarn is very much a noun. Varcoe never gives an example where it is a verb.
Also, it is odd, in an article about the word yarn, never to mention that yarn is used for sewing, knitting or crocheting. Perhaps this is overlooked because those crafts are more often practised by women. I hope not. Anyway, the article does mention sailors using yarn in relation to ropes, but on sailing ships it was also expected that sailors would make and maintain their clothes and the ship’s sails. Sewing, knitting and darning were common skills for sailors.
She does give the examples of ‘yarning with’ and ‘yarn up’ and these are verb forms. But the solid examples of yarn as a noun sure contradicts the opening sentence.
I was waiting for the idea that yarn is spun, for example, from wool, cotton or sisal and a link between that and the spinning of a story being like a silk worm spinning a cocoon. The last example that would have occurred to me, an aged native speaker of English, is of “threads that are tied together to make rope.””
Ok, there were a couple of verb forms present.
I agree about the rather tenuous link between rope and yarn made in the article. Fibres – of any origin (animal, vegetable or mineral, examples being wool, linen or asbestos) – can be spun to make thread or yarn, a skill that has been known all the way back to prehistory, and that is surely the link to “spinning a yarn” as a metaphor for story telling. It’s also hardly a coincidence that we commonly say “I’ve lost the thread” if we forget where a story is going as we tell it.
Rebecca! I’m sure you meant a noun. Yarn is a noun.