[Leica] OT: POSH

[douglas.sharp at gmx.de (Douglas M.Sharp)]

Just found this on a quite excellent site 
http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorp.htm
see also http://www.m-w.com/help/faq/posh.htm
One of those where you can spend (waste?) hours just looking back and forth.
As a fan of old ships I'll stick to the P&O definition.
Douglas



Posh
This is another word with an apocryphal acronymic origin. Popular etymology 
has 
it that posh is an acronym for Port Out, Starboard Home. Supposedly, this 
acronym was printed on first-class tickets issued by the Peninsular and 
Oriental 
Steam Navigation Company going from England to India. The port side on the 
trip 
out would have the coolest cabins (or alternately the cabins with the best 
view). The same would be true of the starboard cabins on the return trip. 
From 
this origin, sprang the usage of the term meaning swank, elegant, or 
fashionable. Unfortunately for this excellent story, no tickets with Posh 
stamped on them have been found and company records reveal no sign of the 
phrase.

The earliest recorded use of posh to mean swank is from the 25 September 
1918 
issue of the British humor magazine Punch. In 1903, P.G. Wodehouse in Tales 
of 
St. Austin's used push to mean fashionable. Whether this was a printer's 
error 
or Wodehouse actually meant to use push is unknown (several later editors 
"corrected" this to read posh). In contrast, according to Merriam Webster 
the 
earliest claim to the acronymic origin dates to 17 October 1935 in the 
London 
Times Literary Supplement, where it is claimed to be of American origin. The 
earliest association with the P&O dates to two years later, almost twenty 
years 
after the word's usage was established.

Posh dates back to at least 1867 in the sense of meaning a dandy or fop. The 
best guess as to its origin is that it derives from Romani, the language of 
the 
Rom (commonly known as Gypsies). In Romani, posh means half and is used in 
monetary terms like posh-houri or half-pence, and posh-kooroona meaning 
half-crown. The progression from money to a fancy dresser to swank is 
logical, 
if undocumented. Alternatively, Partridge postulates that the "swanky" 
meaning 
of posh may be a contraction of polish.