![]() There is a theory among so-called CANOEs – that is, Campaigners who Assign a Nautical Origin to Everything – that P&O ferries, in the days when Britain ruled India, are responsible for giving us the word ‘posh’, from the initial letters of the statement ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’, which appeared on the tickets they sold to wealthy customers for the best berths on their ships. The only answer that is certainly not acceptable is a). This is another popular possible but not definite origin for the word. Fitzgerald’s appreciation of Fletcher’s-or ‘Posh’s’-physical beauty went beyond that of the typical Victorian gentleman (much as Oscar Wilde’s admiration of beautiful young men did). A fisherman named Joseph Fletcher was nicknamed ‘Posh’-possibly because of the s and p sounds in his forename. The first is from a letter of 5 January 1867 written by Edward FitzGerald: ‘I believe I have smoked my pipe every evening but one with Posh at his house.’ FitzGerald was one of several Victorian poets who translated the ancient Persian poem The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into English. But the OED also offers, under the etymology of the word, two intriguing instances of ‘posh’ being used as a proper noun in works of literature: Or it may be related to our modern sense of ‘posh’ – as an adjective – to denote something grand and upper-class. This meaning of ‘posh’ – to denote a dandy – may, the OED cautiously informs us, stem from the original meaning (a coin), perhaps because dandies had lots of money. ![]() Farmer and William Ernest Henley (the latter of whom was the author of the poem ‘ Invictus’ as well as the inspiration for the character Long John Silver). Among other sources, this ‘posh’ appears in the 1902 book Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, compiled by John S. Once again, this ‘posh’ was a noun rather than the more familiar adjective we use today, although, interestingly, this ‘posh’ referred to a dandy: a well-dressed, and often well-off, man about town. Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, an alternate meaning of ‘posh’ arose, again from that constant stream of living language, slang. ![]() And even more curiously, the English Romani term for the same thing, only in the plural (i.e. Curiously, the word has its origins in a Romani term for a coin: the Welsh Romani phrase påš xā̊ra referred to the halfpenny coin. This sense of ‘posh’ is attested from 1830. In the nineteenth century, a ‘posh’ was slang for money, and specifically a halfpenny or another coin of small value, as the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) records. Let’s begin with the word ‘posh’ as a noun. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |