shicker

The Hebrew root שָׁכַר (shakar), meaning to be drunk or to drink deeply, is ancient. It appears in the Book of Genesis, in the story of Noah lying insensible in his tent after the harvest, and again in Proverbs warning against those who linger over wine. From shakar came שִׁכּוֹר (shikkor), the adjective for drunkard, a word Jews carried with them through centuries of diaspora into the Yiddish of Eastern Europe.

In Yiddish, שיכּור (shiker) became both noun and adjective, denoting the drunk who stumbled through the shtetl, the cautionary figure of countless folktales. The word was not merely descriptive. It carried the weight of communal disapproval and occasional dark comedy. When Jewish immigrants sailed to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, shiker came with them in their luggage of idiom.

Australian English proved a hospitable host. By the 1880s, shicker was appearing in colonial newspapers and goldfields slang as a term for liquor itself, not just the person who consumed it. A shicker was a drink, to have a shicker was to take a tot of something strong, and the pubs of Melbourne and Sydney absorbed the word into the broader Australian vernacular without much ceremony.

The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest Australian citation dates to 1859, the same decade that goldfield slang was consolidating into a recognizable dialect. Shicker settled comfortably among other borrowings from German, Irish, and Pacific Pidgin, and survived long after the Yiddish-speaking communities who brought it had largely assimilated. It is now thoroughly Australian, its Hebrew origin invisible to most who use it.