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.