Origins of words

Milanolatino24

Milanolatino24

Milanolatino24

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found out today where the word "POSH" originated from, apparently if you went on a trans Atlantic ship and you were fairly wealthy you could buy a POSH ticket, it stood for Port side Out "PO" and Starboard side Home "SH" so you had the sun on your cabin all the way, it became known if you bought this ticket you were POSH.

Anyone know any other random facts about words?
 
Milanolatino24 said:
found out today where the word "POSH" originated from, apparently if you went on a trans Atlantic ship and you were fairly wealthy you could buy a POSH ticket, it stood for Port side Out "PO" and Starboard side Home "SH" so you had the sun on your cabin all the way, it became known if you bought this ticket you were POSH.
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Yeah, that's not true though.
http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/posh.asp
 
according to the oxford dictionary (google it) there is no official explanation of the word POSH, how ever every time you google it it does come up with the abbreviation Port side out starboard side home
 
The word 'ostracise' (to exclude from a group) comes from the ancient Greek 'ostraka', meaning pottery sherd. This is because in Athens citizens could vote for fellow citizen to be barred from the city - each citizen wrote his vote on a broken piece of pottery (ostraka).

In English, we often have different words for animals and for the meat we get from them - e.g. pig/pork, cow/beef, sheep/mutton. This in contrast to other European languages - for example, the Dutch for pork is 'varkensvlees', which just means pig meat (varken is pig, vlees is meat). In English, the word for the animal comes from Old English, while the word for the meat comes from French. The reason for this is that for 300 years after the Norman invasion, the ruling classes (the only ones who could afford to eat meat regularly) spoke French, and the people who took care of the animals were the native English speakers.
 
Fulax said:
The word 'ostracise' (to exclude from a group) comes from the ancient Greek 'ostraka', meaning pottery sherd. This is because in Athens citizens could vote for fellow citizen to be barred from the city - each citizen wrote his vote on a broken piece of pottery (ostraka).
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However languages and words continue to evolve. To take your example "ostracise" has now become "maximum ban".
 
If anyone tells you an "interesting" word origin on the internet, the likelihood is that it's false. Two infamous examples of this are the "f" word and the "s" word both being acronyms, which they are not.

The best way to find a word origin is to look in the dictionary.
 
Meridian said:
It's a good safe rule of etymology that if someone gives you a clear explanation of the origin of an English word, which make perfect sense, then they are wrong. The main exceptions are words which are clearly just stolen from other languages.
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"Port Out, Starboard Home" doesn't make sense, though.

It's a very good rule of thumb that English words that aren't referring to modern technology are not acronyms. There seems to be a tendency for people to create false etymologies based on acronyms, but in reality they're a modern thing and almost always technological (e.g. laser, radar).

Etymology is a bit of a hobby of mine and I've found that the true explanations usually make perfect sense if you look back far enough.
 
branddaly said:
I can recommend a good book the origin of words. 'The Etymologicon' by Mark Forsyth.
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I've got this and it's an absolutely fascinating read.

Fun fact - the word 'soon' used to have the same meaning as 'now', but when in ye olde days people were asked/nagged about when something would be done, they would invariably say 'I'll do it soon (now)' when in reality it wouldn't be done until later.

Eventually due to over-use the word soon no longer became synonymous with 'now' but instead came to mean a period of time later on.

By the same reckoning, I wonder what 'in 5 minutes' will mean two hundred years from now?
 
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