Get the meaning right

Port out, starboard home and other language myths
By Michael Quinion,
Allen Lane, £ 9.10

The word posh, even the OED tells its readers, originates from the days of sea voyages to India, when affluent passengers booked cabins on the port side when they came out and on the starboard side when they returned home. They did this to avoid the sun during the hottest part of the journey when the ship went through the Suez Canal. Hence the acronym posh to describe the rich since, according to this version, the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company stamped the word posh on tickets for those cabins. Michael Quinion, in this book that punctures many myths about words and phrases, points out that there is not a shred of evidence for this origin of posh. The P&O has denied that tickets with such stamps were ever issued. No such ticket has surfaced. The word can be dated to 1918 while its link with the sea voyage came decades later. The debut of the word was on the pages of Punch. Quinion suggests that the word comes from the London street slang for money and is derived from Romany posh.

Quinion trawls the English language for words and phrases whose origins have baffled people. His research takes him to obscure corners and reveals how English has grown because it has borrowed and adapted from a variety of sources. Words have stories within them and as a diligent and entertaining word historian, Quinion unravels some of the stories. He corrects errors and uncovers meanings. This is not a book to be read in one sitting but to be dipped into for joy and enlightenment.

A peer of the word posh is snob. It is frequently argued that snob is the shortened form of a Latin tag, sine nobilitate, i.e., without nobility. Another story says that Oxbridge undergraduates had to state on admission whether they were of noble descent or not; commoners were marked snob. Quinion dismisses the Latin tag theory as ?either mischievous or mistaken?. In the end of the 18th century, Cambridge undergraduates used snob to describe a townsman. But early usage implied a person of humble rank. The word was a dialect or colloquial term for a cobbler. By the 1830s, the word denoted a person lacking good taste and breeding. William Makepeace Thackeray gave another twist by using the word to describe a man of lowly origin who tries to imitate his superiors. It is only later that the word came to be applied to someone who despises others of lower rank.

Snobs go to fancy places for their honeymoon. One origin of the word is that it was customary for newly-married couples to drink fermented honey (mead) every day, as an aphrodisiac, for one month after the nuptials. Thus honeymonth or honeymoon. It is further said that the custom originated in ancient Babylon. The problem is that the word doesn?t show up in English till the 16th century. Quinion is of the opinion that the origin is very prosaic: it referred to the charmed period after marriage when love was as sweet as honey but which waned like the moon in roughly the same period of time.

It is posh to play golf and one myth says that the word is an acronym for Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden. This was a nice try by an early male chauvinist. Quinion warns that most claims that words originate in acronyms are spurious. (The classic example is the myth that the unprintable F word originates from Fornication Under Consent of King). The origins of golf are unknown but it is probably related to a Dutch word kolf. If you love words and if you love English, this is a book to be kept on your bedside table as a ready reckoner.