Adventuring Among Words PDF
70 Pages·2013·2.1359 MB·other
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http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/guest/Partridge_E.htm If you wish to enjoy a true adventure among words themselves, you cannot do much better than to follow the vicissitudes of phoney, and if you can bear to watch men floundering in bogs and stifling in quicksands, you have only to trace the history of their efforts to solve the etymology or origin of this will-o’-the-wisp of the underworld, later this bogey of journalists, and finally this victim of the philologists. What has led all the guessers astray has been their ignorance of the sociology and the history, not only of the word itself but, more importantly because fundamentally, of the users of the word. Parenthetically I should perhaps mention that although a clear, admittedly brief, account appeared so long ago as 1937, in my Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, no reputable lexicographer published his acceptance until 1950 – and then without reference to me and, what made me chortle with ribald mirth, with an implication that the etymology was derivable from an entry in the greatest of all dictionaries of British English, when, in the fact, no such implication occurs in those majestic volumes.
In Mitford M. Mathews’s magistral Dictionary of Americanisms, this rogue-elephant of a word, this phoney or, as American dictionaries seem to prefer, phony, is defined, the noun as ‘a fake or pretender’ and the adjective as ‘counterfeit, not genuine’. The former is a very late comer, being unrecorded before 1905, whereas the latter was recorded [13] almost a century and a quarter earlier – in a different spelling – and in England; to be precise, in George Parker, A View of Society, 1781, a description of London’s underworld and its hangers-on. The pronunciation phon(e)y is American. It is in this form that the word was re-introduced into Britain by Edgar Wallace just after the First World War...
In Mitford M. Mathews’s magistral Dictionary of Americanisms, this rogue-elephant of a word, this phoney or, as American dictionaries seem to prefer, phony, is defined, the noun as ‘a fake or pretender’ and the adjective as ‘counterfeit, not genuine’. The former is a very late comer, being unrecorded before 1905, whereas the latter was recorded [13] almost a century and a quarter earlier – in a different spelling – and in England; to be precise, in George Parker, A View of Society, 1781, a description of London’s underworld and its hangers-on. The pronunciation phon(e)y is American. It is in this form that the word was re-introduced into Britain by Edgar Wallace just after the First World War...
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