In the hardbitten bear pit of politics, any sign of weakness is pounced on.
The latest favourite barb to be hurled about the federal chamber is “sook” – an oldie but a goodie. A slightly gentler insult than “snowflake”, “bedwetter” or “old jellyback”.
Labor accused the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, of being a tantrum-throwing “sook” this week, for trying to move a motion against the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in the heat of the debate over security checks for people fleeing Gaza.
Dutton was being “irresponsible and a sook”, the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said.
Kate Burridge, a linguistics professor at Monash University, says it’s a feature of Australian culture that we don’t like whingers, people “who can’t remain cheerful in the face of adversity”.
“So they’re sooks or wusses, [they] aren’t stoic,” she says. “That’s where that sort of insulting language comes from.”
The word itself cropped up in Australia and New Zealand at the start of last century, she says, and is thought to be a variant of the English or Scottish word “suck” meaning a “stupid, gullible person”.
The Dictionaries of the Scots Language lists “souk”, “suk”, “suke”, “soock”, “sowk”, “suck” and more as meaning, feeble, silly, foolish. The many definitions also include a “big baby”, an “effeminate person”, a “petted or over-indulged child”.
Burke’s belittling of Dutton wasn’t the first use of the word in the current parliament.
At the start of the month, also inspired by the Gaza issue, the Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce called the PM a “sook”.
Later that day, as Burke was quizzed on visas for Gazans, Joyce complained that someone else had said the word “sook” and demanded it be withdrawn.
The Labor MP Graham Perrett dutifully withdrew. He tells Guardian Australia that, as one of 10 children from a “robust” home with a single (and “stoic”) mum, sook was bandied about frequently, often by an older sibling.
“It meant, ‘Go back to your nappies,’ It’s a sort of, ‘Come on, get up, you’re not hurt.’”
Before the latest kerfuffle, the Labor MP Rob Mitchell referred to the former prime minister (and member for Cook) Scott Morrison, as the “sook from Cook”, saying he didn’t take responsibility for robodebt or the black summer bushfires.
And according to the Labor MP Tim Watt’s condolence motion for his colleague, the late Peta Murphy, it was a term she liked to use.
“I know that Peta would be saying, if she were watching this, just to stop having such a sook!” he said.
Burridge says a lot of insults like sook are generally used as friendly banter and an integral part of Australian “slanguage”. She points to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s 1829 Letter from Sydney in which he talks about the establishment of a common vernacular in the colony. Wakefield wrote:
“The base language of English thieves is becoming the established language of the colony. Terms of slang and flash [convict language] are used, as a matter of course, everywhere, from the gaols to the viceroy’s palace, not excepting the bar and the bench.
“No doubt they will be reckoned quite parliamentary, as soon as we obtain a parliament.”
Perrett says he’s been ejected from parliament more than 100 times but reckons it would be far more if speakers didn’t take into account a bit of wit in the debating pit.
He says he thinks of “sook” – and the related “sooky la la” as being directives to “get on with it”, not as having a crack at someone for being in touch with their feelings. But no one puts too much thought into specific words in the febrile atmosphere of question time, he says.
“When you’re in that jungle you just go straight back to grade five instincts. It’s tooth and claw on that floor.”
