Adventuring Among Words Eric Partridge by Eric Partridge 9781258582715, 1258582716 instant download after payment.

If you wish to enjoy a true adventure among words themselves, you cannot do much better than to follow the vicissitudes of phoney, & if you can bear to watch men floundering in bogs & 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 & 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 & Unconventional English, no reputable lexicographer published his acceptance until 1950 – & 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’ & 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 & a quarter earlier – in a different spelling – & in England; to be precise, in George Parker, A View of Society, 1781, a description of London’s underworld & 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...