Language & Origins
Posh does not stand for port out starboard home
No shipping company ticket has ever been produced bearing the initials. The story is a backronym invented to explain a slang word…
Language & Origins
Word origins, invented etymologies and rules that were never rules.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Language & Origins
Rule of thumb has nothing to do with beating anyone
The supposed legal origin comes from a satirical attack on an eighteenth-century judge who never made the ruling. The phrase itself is older and comes from measurement.
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Language & Origins
Nobody knows where the whole nine yards came from, and that is the finding
Every proposed origin has failed either on dates or on arithmetic. Researchers keep pushing the earliest known use backwards, and…
Language & Origins
The snow vocabulary claim grew by repetition and has no fixed number
A brief remark in an anthropology book was inflated by each retelling until the count reached the hundreds. The linguistics makes…
Language & Origins
The rule against splitting infinitives was imported from Latin by mistake
A Latin infinitive is a single word, so it cannot be split. English infinitives are two words, and putting an adverb between them…
Language & Origins
The preposition rule was one writer's opinion in 1672
A poet criticising a rival introduced the objection, again by analogy with Latin. The most famous joke about it was attributed to…
Language & Origins
Sushi means the rice, and the raw fish has a different name
The word refers to the vinegared rice at the centre of the dish. Raw fish served without it is sashimi, and the confusion has…
Language & Origins
Thomas Crapper was real, and the word is older than he is
He was a genuine sanitary engineer with genuine patents, but he did not invent the flush toilet and the rude word predates him by…
Language & Origins
Ye Olde was always pronounced the, and the culprit is a missing letter
Early English had a letter for the th sound. Printers importing type from the continent had no such letter and substituted the…
Language & Origins
OK began as a joke about deliberately bad spelling
A newspaper fad for comic abbreviations produced it in 1839, and a presidential campaign nickname the following year gave it the…
Language & Origins
The Chinese word for crisis does not contain opportunity
The second character means something closer to an incipient moment or a critical point. The uplifting reading was popularised in…
Language & Origins
That email about life in the 1500s invented every etymology in it
A chain message circulating in the late 1990s supplied vivid origins for a dozen common phrases. Not one of them survives checking…