Sister Anne, my eight grade English instructor, was no language reactionary. She insisted that the word “ain’t” certainly was in the dictionary and was perfectly acceptable in informal settings. She also allowed the use of “don’t give a tinker’s dam” because she said it is a “dam”, not a “damn.”
Only it isn’t. The fanciful explanation is that the industrious tinkers would mend a hole in a kettle or some such by building a circular dam around the hole to keep in place molten metal for the repair. It’s a folk etymology, one that I have always liked. Actually, tinkers must have been a rough bunch and had the reputation for robust swearing, hence “tinker’s damn”. Of course, the folk version is just more fun.
I suppose there has always been a first class in travel, if for no other reason than desire of the wealthy to distinguish themselves from the riff-raff. First class travel is more comfortable and just snooty. However, you might stop believing the nonsense about “posh”. There were no Port-Out Starboard-Home cabins for the British aristocrats in their travels to colonial India. This is not etymology but it is a nice folk etymology, a fanciful and often interesting fable about word origins. This folk etymology is particularly absurd. A steamer on its way from India to England would travel for the most part south then north around Africa. The hot sun would beat down on both sides of the ship during daylight hours. No doubt the nicer cabins would cost a great deal more than steerage and a poor guy like Leonard DiCaprio couldn’t travel in comfort. If the clever nonsense about posh were true there would be ticket stubs and manifests stating such a class. But there are no such tickets or manifests. The trouble with demonstrating that the posh tale is wrong is that no one knows how “posh” came to be.
Folk etymologies are often clever. I like the one about “minding your p’s and q’s”. No, not the flapdoodle about the bar-keep. Everybody please stop saying pub tenders would tell a half-soused patron to mind your p’s and q’s, that is, keep your own tab of your pints and quarts and tell me what to charge you after you are truly hammered. Really? Not even close. The one I like is that the phrase originated from early printing where the master printer would tell the apprentice to mind his p’s and q’s. In early, but not too distant times, a printer would set type by hand, letter by letter to form a word and then a page. The flat of words was inked then pressed onto the paper. So individual type face letters were mirror-image and p’s and q’s would be hard to distinguish unless you could read and write like Leonardo da Vinci. Unfortunately, this is an ingenious folk etymology but just not true. The OED records documents using the phrase, particularly by school teachers, long before movable type came to England in the 15th century. Perhaps there was in the beginning a reference to handwriting, but all written records seem to carry the simple meaning of a caution to behave.
A folk etymology that fooled me and probably most everybody is “sophomore” the wise fool. This is folk etymology linking Gr. sophos (wise) with moron. Actually, the word sophomore is derived from a British school term sophister (from sophumer) or “arguer” a somewhat disparaging reference to second year students, that is, that their arguments are sophistry.
And I am sure everybody, and that includes me, thought that the word “female” is some kind of male dominant language term for a gender that is less than “male.” A sort of diminutive male. Or perhaps descended from the word “male” maybe taken from Adam’s rib. But no. Female is simply derived from L. femella, a young woman from L. femina, a woman. As for the word “woman” itself, well maybe that is part of male oriented English. In Old English wif was simply “woman” (but later a married woman) and then came wifman, the usual OE term for woman. The latter is a conjoining of wif to man which in OE meant not a male but simply “human”. So once again it seems the word for woman was a person somewhat derived from a human. And just as a final note for those who didn’t study Old English in college, the OE word for “man” was wer as in Modern English “werewolf” a really male dominant term. All men turn into animals at night or day.
Two Strikes 