Erudition without tears

There never was a ticket with the word ‘POSH’ stamped on it by the P&O shipping line, which meant a passenger to India went out on the port side and returned on the starboard and got the best of the cooling breezes. So, where did the word come from? Michael Quinion says humans fear the unfamiliar and will go to great lengths to discover how a word or phrase came into being and remove its mystery. The mixture of laboured logic and startling inventiveness that gave birth to the word ‘posh’, though, is not completely unfounded. ‘Posh’ was originally the Romany for halfpenny and though it would have taken sackfuls of the stuff to get to India and back it was money. And in 1892 in the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody a swell called Murray Posh oozing money turns up on the Pooter doorstep, and in 1918 it appears in Punch when an RAF officer says he’s had ‘a posh time’.