Did you by any chance mean tort?
Definitions
Wiktionary
- n. Australia, New Zealand A scam or fraud, especially involving the misappropriation of public money or resources.
- v. Australia, New Zealand, transitive To cheat or defraud.
Etymologies
- Probably a back-formation from rorty ("boisterous or rowdy, saucy, dissipated, or risqué"). Originally slang but now in common usage. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The other one I think is a rort is the $6.60 ringtones they advertise on Video Hits.”
“Are you suggesting that HC used public funds to buy these houses - ie some kind of rort?”
“I never heard "rort" til I went to live in Sydney for a couple of years.”
“Greens climate change spokeswoman Senator Christine Milne said the land-use push appeared to be a repeat of a land-clearing "rort" won by Australia in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.”
“It is exhilarating and I can see how some teams that lack moral clarity and have a weakness of leadership can take this sense of empowerment and use it as an excuse to bash women, rort the salary cap and generally act like dicks etc.”
““Squatters have taken over a house at the centre of rort revelations, Karla Adam reports from London””
“The sharks of any rort are left to cruise as they are considered “too hard”.”
Cheeseburger Gothic » And another thing I lurv about America….
“Eating out in South-East Asia sounds ridiculously cheap to Australians; making mobile phone calls in Africa appears to be a total rip-off; your cheap US meal is a rort once you tip the surly wait staff.”
Don’t Get Ripped Off With Foreign Currency | Lifehacker Australia
“Zimbabwe Speaker, was trounced in the first Parliamentary elections and that was despite his best efforts to rort the count and his best efforts to intimidate, harass and oppress the people of Zimbabwe.”
“And now we've seen him in a second round try and rort a poll by violence and oppression.”
Transcript - The Hon Stephen Smith MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘rort’.
Tweets
Looking for tweets for rort.
oroboros According to NPR's Says You: a rowdy party or celebration. May 19, 2012
yarb It's not one of those Aussie-cliché words which everyone knows are Australian. But that only goes to strengthen its status as a true Australianism (and New Zealandism, baaaa!) Jun 15, 2011
bilby Funnily enough I wasn't aware of how Australian (and NZ, baaaa!) it was or I might have been a bit more self-conscious about bandying it around. Perhaps what I'm confessing is that it's not one of those words that Australians recognise as being Australian, like sheila. Jun 15, 2011
yarb Well, I've reinstalled my dickey OED and it's not much help. Apparently it's a back-formation from rorty, adj. (also raughty) "of dubious propriety" (among other senses) which is of course "of obscure origin" (OED-speak for "sorry we haven't a clue").
The only usages it gives of the verb form are as gerunds - rorting used as a noun. Jun 15, 2011
yarb I can't remember the last time I encountered an Australianism that was totally new to me, like this. I quite often run into regional American slang with which I'm unfamiliar, and it's always exciting when I do, but as a Brit I always identified more closely with Australians (and hence their lingo) than with Americans.
Would love to know the etymology of rort. I bet it's some weird Gaelic thing; that would explain why it's so strange to me. Jun 15, 2011
bilby It's beloved of newspaper headlines because it's so compact and abrupt.
TAX CLAIMS RORT.
BANK RORT PROBE.
That kind of thing.
Jun 15, 2011
yarb Usage by bilby on red or green. Jun 14, 2011