What Does "Fair Dinkum" Mean —And Why It's at the Heart of Christmas
✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦
The first time I used the phrase "fair dinkum" in a piece of writing, I paused and asked myself if I was really doing this.
I'm a guy from the Midwest. Lawrence, Kansas, to be exact. Not exactly the outback. My exposure to Australian slang is limited to exactly what you'd expect: a handful of films, a few conversations, and an inexplicable fondness for a turn of phrase that has absolutely no business being in a Christmas story set in a celestial city called Paradise.
And yet.
"Fair dinkum" is the phrase that unlocked the whole book for me.
What Fair Dinkum Actually Means
For the uninitiated: fair dinkum is Australian slang meaning genuine, true, authentic, the real deal. It's used as both an adjective ("that's a fair dinkum story" — meaning that's genuinely true) and as emphatic affirmation ("Fair dinkum? Really? Honestly?").
It carries a particular weight that most English synonyms for "genuine" don't quite match. There's something about the sound of it — the slightly comic physicality of it — that suggests a person who takes truth seriously but doesn't take themselves too seriously.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly the character of Mark the Herald Angel.
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Mark's Standard
In the world of MARK! The Herald Angel, "fair dinkum" is Mark's highest standard of excellence. Not gold stars. Not five-star reviews. Not corner offices.
Fair dinkum.
He applies it to pencil sharpness, journalism, the quality of a story, the reliability of a bus schedule.
When Mark says something is "fair dinkum," he means it's the genuine article — true all the way through, with nothing false or inflated or performed about it.
And here's what I love about that as a standard for Christmas: because Christmas, at its core, is the most audaciously fair dinkum claim in human history.
The Fair Dinkum Claim of Christmas
Think about what Christmas actually asserts. Not as sentiment. Not as tradition. Not as the culturally acceptable season of vague warmth and goodwill and twinkle lights — though I am not opposed to twinkle lights.
As a claim about what actually happened.
Christmas asserts that the Creator of the universe — the Author of every galaxy and every molecule and every spinning planet — chose to become a human baby. Born not in a palace but in a barn. To a teenage girl in an occupied territory. In a city so crowded there was no room at the inn.
And that this was not a last resort or a plan B. It was always the plan. The most deliberate, intentional, costly act of love ever performed.
If that's true — and I believe with everything in me that it is — then it is the most fair dinkum thing that has ever happened.
Mark the Herald Angel applies his highest standard to his reporting. He deals only in what is true and fair dinkum. And when he stands in a stable in Bethlehem and looks at the face of a newborn baby — and recognizes in that face the very light of creation itself — his reporter's instinct and his deepest personal standard align perfectly.
This is the story. This is real. This is fair dinkum.
✦ MARK! The Herald Angel — a fair dinkum Christmas story in prose — is available at MarkTheHerald.com. Fair dinkum, fair dinkum, indeed.
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