"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/09/17 (redneck, pommy)

I have to thank Pamela Smith who e-mailed in to ask about the origin of "redneck". She said, is it so obvious as it seems?  It is purely sunburnt necks from people working in the fields? But there mayby a little bit more to it than that, because it was first applied during the Great Depression, which was during the 1930s, when food was very scarce, particularly in the rural South, the southern states of America, and so many poor people subsisted almost entirely on maize. And they used to eat something called hominy grits, which I have eaten when I lived at the States. It's loke a sort of porridge maid of maize, entirely. And that diet was very lacking in niacin. And severe niacin deficiency can cours a really harsh reddening of the skin. It's called pellagra. It was endemic during the Great Depression because of that real lack of food. Sunlight only made it worse and so, if you imagine these poor Southernes, working in the sun, they had red neck like probably nobody else at the time. So quite a sad origin for that one. But it made me think also about the word "pommy", which, of course is what the Australians like to nickname the Brits,  and that derives from "pomegranate". A pomegranate, with an Australian accent, was in turn wordplay for a Jimmy Grant, and a Jimmy Grant was rhyming slang for an immigrant, somebody who had just arrived on the shores of Australia, and very oftgen, again, fair-skinned Brits would arrive on the shore and become completely sunburned from the blazing sun in Australia, and so pommys, short from pomegranates, because of these poor, red-necked Brit arriving. Nothing to do with being a Prisoner of Her Majesty, which is famous acronym, or a backronym, that's applied to POM, and everything to do with sunburned skin.