Good morning from Magpie HQ. Today I thought I'd do a thread on backronyms. These are words which have evolved as words in their own right, but which humans have come up with (often very pleasing, sometimes trite) things that they supposedly stand for. Strong language ahead in a couple of examples.

A while ago someone very confidently told me that "news" stood for "notable events, weather and sport". Of course, it doesn't, it simply means "things that are new". But there are quite a few examples of this.

Golf is a good example. It's thought to derive from Middle Scots golf, from Middle Dutch colf (=club) and thus which is simply named for the thing you play it with. However someone decided it would made a better story if it were an acronym standing for "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden".

Likewise, shit, whose etymology can be traced as far back as a Proto-Indo-European word meaning to separate, divide (and hence is related to schism etc), existed many centuries before someone decided that because manure was combustible it stood for Store High In Transit.

And fuck, one of the objectively oldest words in the English language, and ultimately from a root meaning strike or beat (hence why kestrels used to be known as windfuckers), definitively does not come from Fornication Under Command of the King.

Perhaps my favourite example of this, and one I'm genuinely sorry isn't the correct origin, is the word posh. Posh is one of those words that nobody is certain where it came from; but, by far the most likely origin is from Romani, as "posh-koroona" (half a crown) was used to mean anything expensive.

What we can be absolutely certain of is that the backronym Port Out Starboard Home holds no water (pun intended). The idea is that it came from the days of transatlantic liners, when first-class passengers would be given a port cabin on the crossing to the US, and starboard cabin on the way back.

This was so they could (supposedly) get the benefit of the most sunlight as their cabins would be south-facing. Nautical microeconomics aside, as nice an idea as it is, there just isn't any evidence of this being where we get the word posh. A nice story nonetheless.

TL;DR: pleasing-sounding backronyms are rarely, if ever, correct.

This was fascinating. it provokes a question, though. Is "Windhover" a bowdlerisation of "Windfucker," or did it arise as an entirely separate name?

It's an interesting one and my other special interest is birds, so it's especially interesting for me. I think there's just about enough to say that windhover is a later bowdlerisation; "fuck" has been offensive in English for a very long time.

Coda: There's a separate debate about "windsucker", which appears at almost the same time as "windfucker". Nobody is sure whether it's a bowdlerisation too, or whether "windfucker" is a misreading of a long s when it was written "windſucker", which was then the accepted style for non-word-final S.

Given the long history of fuck, I suspect the claimed derivation of windfucker is also bowdlerised, fwiw - it seems more straightforward to me that kestrels simply look like they're fucking an invisible mate in mid-air.

Potentially. A lot of bird/nature terms were a lot less polite than we would consider to be proper nowadays - wheatear, for instance, is simply "white-arse".

Yes - as an extremely bad birder that's a useful titbit to know for identifying them, that one!

I've always loved that so many British bird names are simply descriptions of what the bird does or how it looks - woodpecker, treecreeper, whitethroat, dipper, wagtail, redshank...

…and my favourite, blackbird 🤣 well done whoever thought of that one.

I hold off on the plaudits because the blackbird (a) isn't entirely black thanks to its yellow beak, and (b) if female, isn't black at all. So a black bird is likely to be a crow or a raven, but not a blackbird. Which is the sort of thing that gets the namers of birds glared at.

The peak of this is the black headed gull, which doesn't have a black head and the black head it doesn't have isn't there all year round either

It is a gull. But as said, it has its black head (which is brown) for about two months of the year.

I have just learned that in 2005(ish) it was removed from the genus Larus and placed with nine others in the resurrected genus Chroicocephalus, which means that until recently even the sort of gull it was was incorrect.

Thankfully chroico- means coloured rather than black, which would have been the final insult.

Bless this incredible birdnerd thread and all who pedant in her 💯