Can your Flamingo do the Flamenco?

A lot of people have a favourite story about the origin of a common word or phrase. But are these stories true? A new booklet, Can your Flamingo do the Flamenco?, which we are giving away with the new revised edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary uncovers the truth behind many word histories, and dispels a few myths along the way.

One of the most frequently repeated explanations of a word origin is the story that posh comes from the initials of 'port out, starboard home'. This is supposed to refer to the location of the more desirable cabins - on the port side on the outward trip and on the starboard side on the return - on passenger ships between Britain and India in the nineteenth century. Sadly, no evidence, such as tickets or documents stamped with the letters P.O.S.H., have ever been found, and a more likely story is that it comes from a nineteenth-century slang term for a dandy, from thieves' slang for 'money'.

One of the new entries in the revised edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is pap, meaning both 'a paparazzo' and 'to take a photograph of a celebrity without permission'. Paparazzo was originally the name of a society photographer in Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita. By the following year paparazzo was appearing as a general name in English for a press photographer, and it had acquired a plural paparazzi, which is how it most commonly appears nowadays.

Most people these days don't know Latin - otherwise you wouldn't see so many adverts for a toothpaste called Trident ('three teeth'). Yet knowing Latin is no help in figuring out the origin of the word snob. For a long time people thought it was connected with the Latin phrase sine nobilitate 'without nobility', abbreviated to s-nob, which then became snob.This isn't very likely, though, as snob was first used in the late eighteenth century to mean 'a shoemaker or cobbler'. The word soon came to refer to any person of humble origin, and then to describe someone who gives exaggerated respect to people of superior social standing or wealth. Incidentally, until a recent redevelopment there was a shoe-repair shop in Oxford called The Oxford Snob.

Despite our instinctive ideas, the expression go pear-shaped, 'go wrong', does not come from the idea of a woman putting on weight around her hips, but rather from RAF slang. Although the first written examples are from the early 1980s, around the time of the Falklands War, it was probably in use several decades earlier. It may have arisen as a darkly humorous reference to the shape of a fighter plane after it has nosedived and crashed into the ground, or it could describe a novice pilot's attempts to produce a perfect circle when performing a loop in the air.

We'll probably never know the true origin of some words. An example is loo, meaning 'toilet', which Nancy Mitford first put into print in her 1940 novel Pigeon Pie. Perhaps the most plausible suggestion is that it comes from Waterloo, a trade name for iron cisterns in the early twentieth century. A popular but unlikely one, not least because of the discrepancy in dates, refers it to gardyloo, a cry used in eighteenth-century Edinburgh to warn passers-by that someone was about to throw dirty water or slops out of a window into the street. It is based on pseudo-French gar de l'eau 'mind the water' (the correct French would be gare l'eau). Another French phrase is behind a third idea, that British servicemen in France during the First World War picked up lieux d'aisances 'places of ease', used for 'a toilet'.

Discover more fascinating stories of the origins of many words we use everyday - the new booklet is available with the revised Concise Oxford English Dictionary published this month.

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