Word of the Month-Australian Slang

Sunbeam

– noun: an item of cutlery or crockery laid on the table but not used, and so not needing to be washed.

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The story behind:

In What’s Their Story? A History of Australian Words (OUP 2010), It is mentioned that sunbeam in the sense ‘an item of cutlery or crockery laid on the table but not used, and so not needing to be washed’ is an Australianism, and this was noted in a review of the book in the Canberra Times. This prompted a number of letters to the editor of the newspaper:

In his review ... Robert Willson observes that he has ‘never heard the expression sunbeam’. ... Me neither. My mother has always referred to such an item as a ‘shining jewel’. It’s fascinating that while ‘the rest of the world seems to think that there is no need for any word to describe such items’, they apparently loom large enough in the Australian psyche to have attracted at least two different Labels.

There may be regional differences in expressions such as those mentioned ... referring to implements left on the table after a meal. I don’t use any such expressions myself, but my mother-in-law, who spent almost all her life in Victoria, often said, ‘That’s a sunbeam!’

It is possible the term has a British dialect origin, but it is not recorded in any of the dialect dictionaries.