Everyone knows this one. Back in the days of the great steamers to India, the wealthy paid extra for the shady cabins, port side on the way out, starboard side on the way home, so the sun never cooked them. The booking clerk stamped the tickets P.O.S.H. and a word was born. It is the perfect fact. It has a mechanism, a class system, and a ship. You have repeated it. So has every tour guide on every old liner ever floated.
There is not a single ticket, brochure, or shipping record with P.O.S.H. stamped on it, and people have looked hard. The Oxford English Dictionary, whose entire job is chasing words to their source, finds no evidence for the acronym and files it under folk etymology. 'Posh' shows up in print meaning stylish around 1914, and the steamer story only appears later, attached after the fact because it sounds so good. The likeliest origin is an older slang 'posh' meaning money or a dandy. This is the pattern with almost every word people claim is an acronym. The neat backstory arrives second, built to fit a word that already existed. The acronym is the souvenir, not the source.
Reception
- Oxford English Dictionary: poshPRIMARY
- World Wide Words: PoshREFERENCE