10 Words For Other Words

If you’ve been keeping up with the HH “500 Words” YouTube series, you’ll so far have found out about 280 of the 500 words we’re going to look at this year. But this week, we’re turning things around. 

So from hypernyms and hyponyms to holonyms and holophrases, this week’s video is looking at 10 Words for Other Words.

(And for more words like those, then be sure to check out the HH article that inspired it over on Mental Floss.)

One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, is backronym. We’ve discussed some backronyms on YouTube before—mainly in our 10 Word Origins Stories That Are Completely Untrue video—and it’s a myth-busting topic that’s always worth revisiting.

Backronyms are words or phrases that are widely and mistakenly believed purported to be acronyms. Posh, for instance, is often claimed to stand for “port out, starboard home”, a reference to moneyed cruise ship passengers paying for the best views on both the outward and homeward bound parts of their voyage. Golf too is said to stand for “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden” (or ladies do something else that begins with F). And the distress signal SOS is famously claimed to stand for “save our souls”, or “save our ship”.

“It says, ‘you may have been missold PPI.’”

None of these is true, of course. Posh is simply thought to come from an old slang word for cash or loose change. Golf is probably descended from an old Dutch word for a club, colf or kulf (albeit with perhaps some influence of a Scots word for a stout blow to the head). And the letter combination “SOS” was chosen as a distress signal for no other reason than that its rhythmic and symmetrical combination of dots and dashes [· · · – – – · · ·] is so immediately noticeable. Incidentally, precisely the same combination of dots and dashes could also be used to spell the letters “VTB” in Morse code, but the designation SOS was used because of its own symmetry and memorability.

In Morse code, the distress signal SOS [· · · – – – · · ·] could just as accurately be interpreted as the letters VTB.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 22 July 2016

Before SOS was adopted in the early 1900s, however, the standard telegraph distress signal was “CQD” [– · – ·    – – · –    – · ·]. It’s fair to say that that’s hardly the most recognisable or memorable arrangement of dits and dahs on offer, so why pick that?

Well, on their own the letters “CQ” had long been used as a telegraphic distress signal as they sound identical to the French word “sécu”, an abbreviation of sécurité. The Marconi Telegraph Company simply added a letter D to this to make their first recommended distress signal, CQD. But just like SOS, CQD also fell foul of backronymy and before long myths had emerged claimed that it stood for “come quickly—danger!”, or “come quickly—drowning!”

Problems with interpreting the confusing set of letters “CQD” over a poor signal, however, eventually led to calls for a more immediately recognizable distress signal to be adopted, and so SOS was officially introduced in 1906. 

Poppycock

Something smells a bit iffy about poppycock.

People have been using it to mean “nonsense” or “useless blather” since the early 1800s, when it first began to appear in the colloquial English of the northeast United States. But how did it get there in the first place? 

According to several online sources—including the Merriam-Webster Dictionary—poppycock is a corruption of the Dutch word pappekak, a compound of pap, meaning “soft, chewed up food”, and kak, meaning, well, “cack”. Put together, pappekak, as the Oxford English Dictionary so eloquently explains, means something along the lines of “excrement as soft as porridge”. And on that basis it’s easy to see how the word came to describe something of little value.

Might be worth considering a rebrand...

But as the OED also points out, “no such word appears to be attested in Dutch”. That is to say, pappekak is a linguistic conjecture, a word only presumed to exist by keen etymologists clutching for possible origins of poppycock. So if porridgey poop isn’t quite right (which it isn’t in more ways than one, certainly), then what is?

Bizarrely, a more plausible explanation is that poppycock comes from the Dutch poppekak, meaning “doll excrement”. As odd as that might sound, poppekak is actually a genuine Dutch word attested in an old idiomatic phrase—zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, or “as fine as powdered doll’s excrement”—once used to describe someone showing what the OED calls “excessive religious zeal.”

So we can only presume that Dutch immigrants arriving in America in the early 1800s brought this peculiar expression with them. There, poppekak eventually morphed into poppycock and, perhaps through association with the pulpit-thumping preachers of the time, ultimately came to mean “empty prattle”, “claptrap”, and “nonsense”.