Robot Claw

Today I shall tackle the long unanswered question of the origin of a particular piece of Australian slang.

“Going berko” is the term. As in “Watch out, he just found out we broke the window and he’s going berko”. Irrationally angry. Crazy. Enraged. Demented even.

I’ve used this for years, and still do. Sometimes the cats go berko for instance. A few weeks ago KLS and I had a discussion about the term, which she’d never heard before me. A rudimentary online search shows that it is almost exclusively Australian, and slang.

The word ‘Berko’ exists with other uses of course, most notably as a name (of African origin) or an English village. The urban slang dictionary includes it with no origin. Where did it come from? Why is it just Australian?

I suspect, as you may have guessed from the above, that the term derives from David Berkowitz, the so-called ‘Son of Sam’. It makes sense in many ways, and is indeed what I assumed the origin has been most most of my life. But could this be true? Could this slang be as recent as 1977? Is it actually possible that Australian schoolyard slang could be derived from a NY serial killer and that the same slang doesn’t even exist in America?

I have no answers, and for once information seems very scant online. What do you think? Do you use the term? How long have you used it? Where do you think it came from?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2011 at 8:39 pm and is filed under The Unknown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.