From "posh" to "Jerusalem artichoke", our resident etymologist unravels the irresistible myths behind some familiar words and expressions.
"Did you know," someone asked me the other day, "that there are wild pigs in London’s sewers?" The question wasn’t directed solely at me, since it appeared on a breathless social media post that proceeded to explain that beneath the exclusive streets of London’s Hampstead lives a colony of feral pigs, feeding on the unappetising waste that is regularly flushed through the system.
Who knew? Only a large proportion of credulous Londoners, as it turns out, some 200 years ago.
As urban myths go (and thankfully this is one), this particular story is remarkably enduring. One of the first to document it was the Victorian reformer Henry Mayhew, who was told it by toshers, the city’s sewer scavengers. He himself was rather sceptical, but that didn’t stop the jaw dropping story spreading far and wide.
Linguists and lexicographers recognise all too well the temptation to fabricate compelling stories. To us, they are known as "folk etymologies", fictional accounts of the origins of words that catch the imagination and are eventually ushered in as the truth.
If you love a good yarn, so called because we "spin it", English has more urban myths than you can shake a stick at (the one attached to that expression, by the way, is that George Washington once waved a ceremonial wooden sword over a sea of defeated British troops).
I remember reading a lovely vignette by the writer Jeanette Winterson, in which she wrote of her plumber’s grave diagnosis that her washing machine had "given up the goat". When Winterson gently quizzed him on this particular idiom, he explained that goats were once a traditional inheritance, "given up" by a dying father to his heir.
To be honest, it makes just as much sense as the theory for another goaty expression, "to get someone’s goat", which is said to hark back to the tradition of raising goats alongside racehorses in order to keep them calm.
Unscrupulous rivals, the story goes, would steal the goat on race day so that the horse would panic and perform poorly. Needless to say there is zero evidence to bear this out.
A lot of our language myths emerge because we can’t quite get our heads or tongues around a foreign phrase. A Jerusalem artichoke, for instance, has nothing at all to do with the Holy City, and everything to do with the fact that it’s a type of heliotrope – girasole in Italian – and turns towards the sun.
Girasole (meaning sunflower) was slightly tricky to pronounce, and anyway, it sounded a bit like Jerusalem, so we decided to plump for that.
One of the most infamous linguistic myths has attached itself to the word posh. This, you will read, comes from the initials of "Port Out, Starboard Home", a reference to the location of the more desirable cabins on passenger ships between Britain and India in the 19th century.
Such cabins would be sheltered from the heat of the sun and were eagerly reserved by wealthy passengers. The P&O steamship company consequently issued stamped tickets for first-class accommodation carrying the letters P.O.S.H. It’s a lovely (and convincing) story, but sadly no such tickets have ever been found to support it.
The more likely explanation is that posh arose from thieves’ slang for money.
For all their flights of fancy, legends such as these do tell us something: that words can feed our imagination as powerfully as any folk tale. But – and you would expect me to say this – when it comes to our words, the real stories rarely need embellishing.
The dictionary is full of incredible stories, but that will never stop us creating fictional ones. Who knows? Those pigs might actually fly.
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