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Okay, I'm dealing with another dialect's slang here, so I may get this wrong -- please correct as needed. But as a Larry, I had to represent.
larrikin (LAR-i-kin) - n., (Aus. slang) a good-natured but wild-spirited non-conformist.
The original sense, back in the 1870s, was closer to a hoodlam or a rowdy, but this morphed early/mid-20th century -- though that said, dictionaries that focus on American dialects of English still only give that older sense. As slang, the origin's unknown and there's a lot of hypotheses about it, and have been since it first popped up, including a West County dialect of England, alteration of larking, leery kin meaning a prisoner, and a clearly made-up folk etymology involving a guy named Larry.
---L.
larrikin (LAR-i-kin) - n., (Aus. slang) a good-natured but wild-spirited non-conformist.
The original sense, back in the 1870s, was closer to a hoodlam or a rowdy, but this morphed early/mid-20th century -- though that said, dictionaries that focus on American dialects of English still only give that older sense. As slang, the origin's unknown and there's a lot of hypotheses about it, and have been since it first popped up, including a West County dialect of England, alteration of larking, leery kin meaning a prisoner, and a clearly made-up folk etymology involving a guy named Larry.
---L.
