Twelve weeks is a long programme for students with short attention spans (not the ADHD kind, which is easier to manage than that of those who merely get easily bored), and I grow tired and self-pitying when it comes to carrying the energy–let’s do another close reading!–of the lesson.
I am reminded of one of my high school science teachers who was said, at the start of a lesson, to have thrown pohars into 3Mk’s science lab. We assumed it was because she was eccentric (and perhaps, secretly, deadly), but maybe she was weary of being the only person in the room to have any visible enthusiasm for her subject area?
(At the time I was in 3Ln, and 3Mk, including Dwayne, were our arch-rivals. Any firework-throwing initiatives should therefore have been supported by us, but we were instead perturbed, as I recall.)
May 8, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I’m sure that should be Po-Ha.
May 8, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Yes; that spelling looks better. I couldn’t find anything on Google save with the titular spelling, which was provided by an Australian contributor to urban dictionary. I don’t remember ever trying to spell it at the time I was in the makers’ target market!
May 8, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Pronounced Pooh-Har isn’t it though?
he he.. titular.. he he
May 8, 2007 at 9:52 pm
It was pronounced poh-ha here on the westside, or at least in my small corner of the westside.
Tomorrow I’ll look it up in the DNZE at work and see if I can find the regional variations or at least an etymology.
May 9, 2007 at 1:06 pm
We called them double-happies.
May 9, 2007 at 6:53 pm
I have a distinct memory of that being the name of the Chinese manufacturer.
For years after they were banned I kept a jar of double happies for a special occasion. Then one day I decided enough was enough and let them off. I thought they would be duds, but maybe they had dried out in the jar or something, because they sounded loud as gunshots.
May 9, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Ah; the Chinese connection steers me in a far more profitable direction in my googling.
Worksafe in the great state of Victoria has the paperwork on-line for applying for a licence to discharge Chinese firecrackers (html cache of a pdf). Po Ha crackers are distinct from other kinds by virtue of their small size and having 16 crackers per string. And in Queensland they propose restricting those crackers that can be discharged at Chinese new year to “Po-Ha size crackers without head rolls in the near future” (ditto).
As I child I think I may have confused Po Ha with puha, as I assumed the firecrackers were indigenous to this country. This was likely also largely due to the local Pakeha kids’ habit of assuming anything either particularly menacing or indeed particularly fun somehow orginated with our Maori classmates.
But now, should I correct my spelling in the entry title or leave it as is?
May 9, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I think I missed out badly, as I have no memory at all of pohars, po-has or puha crackers. We had the tiny little tom thumbs, double-happies and then something rather larger, called a cannon I think – quite stubby, bright red, with the wick half way along the barrel. They made an enormous noise in a cream can.
We knew they weren’t indigenous, as the only place to buy firecrackers was the Chinese run greengrocers in Dargaville (all yaer round, as I recall).
May 10, 2007 at 8:39 am
I think po-has and tom thumbs might be one and the same, or possibly po-has and double happies? I must own up and confess my experience of fire crackers in-the-hand to be sketchier still: I was (and still am) easily frightened by smoke, fire and loud bangs as a child and tended to run away whenever firecrackers were produced. Although I remember my parents used to call them squibs, which was a term that seemed to have migrated with them from Southland.
This whole discussion is very like some of the work done by this project into the regional variations in names for common things in childhood. But I think the Dargaville grocer was on to a good thing: when do kids not want to let off firecrackers? (Well, prior to 1989 or whenever it was they were banned.)
May 10, 2007 at 8:49 am
Jessie: sorry–the spam filter ate your comment (as it sometimes eats my replies), but like a diamond retrieved from a grease trap, it is now restored to its rightful place.
It strikes me that all these names would make excellent titles for cocktails.