Eats, roots and leaves

 There is a well-known book on punctuation called Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the title of which is based on a joke which goes as follows:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, & leaves."

 Eats, Shoots and Leaves  written by Lynne Truss was followed by Eats, Roots and Leaves by  Nicholas Waters who set out to criticise people he described as ‘grammar fascists’.

 It occurred to me, slightly late in the day, that it is only Australians and New Zealanders who would have found this a slightly salacious joke title.  This is because we have the meaning of root which is labelled coarse in the OED, that is, ‘to have sexual intercourse’.

 In British English to root is what pigs do when they dig up the ground searching for truffles.  It is not, as you might intuitively think, related to root meaning ‘to dig out by the roots’, but to a Germanic word meaning ‘to plough’.  What the pig does to the soil with its snout is akin to what the plough does.

 This sense of root extends from pigs to some other animals that dig up the soil,  and to humans who rummage around trying to find something. The only other meaning that British English offers is from schoolboy slang and is ‘to kick in the backside’.

 The Americans added root for meaning to support a team or an individual and the British picked that up as well.  I think that Australians prefer to barrack for their teams. The OED links this meaning without explanation to the rooting of the pigs, but American Heritage suggests that it might be from the British dialect word rout meaning ‘to bellow or roar’.

 And then there is the coarse slang of the Australians and New Zealanders, which leads us, almost unwillingly because we don’t like to encourage Americanisms, to adopt the pronunciation [raut] for route so as to avoid the taboo colouring of root.  

 As a flow-on from the British English use we also talk about pig-rooting the land when we mean that we are digging it up in a fairly haphazard fashion as a pig does. And we talk about a horse pig-rooting when it kicks its back legs up because, it is suggested, it looks rather like a pig rooting for underground delicacies.