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. 

Handicap

There’s an old story that claims the word handicap derives from wounded soldiers returning home from war with injuries preventing them from returning to their day jobs, and leaving them with no option other than to beg on the streets, their caps literally held in their hands to catch the pennies of passers-by.

Nothing says wealth and sophistication better than a puffball skirt

As ingenious a story as this is, it is of course completely untrue. (Not least because this would have likely given us the word “capihand” rather than handicap.) In fact the true origin of the word lies in an old method of trading goods called “hand-in-cap”, the origins of which date back as far as the fourteenth century at least.

Imagine there are two traders who want to exchange goods, but who are unsure about the relative value of the items they’re looking to swap. In a “hand-in-cap” trade, they would turn to a third party—essentially, a kind of umpire—who would take a look at the items up for exchange and assess their value. If he thought there were any kind of discrepancy between the two, he’d come up with a price (called the “odds”, or the “boot”) that the owner of the cheaper lot would then have to add into the exchange to make it fair.

Next, out comes the cap. The umpire, having given his assessment of the exchange, would then hold out his upturned cap. Both of the traders would take a few loose coins from their pockets, and go to drop them in it. If they agreed to the exchange, they’d drop their money into the cap, but if they didn’t, they’d keep it in their hands.

If both traders agreed, the exchange would go ahead as planned and the umpire would get to keep whatever change had been thrown in the cap as his fee. If neither of the traders agreed, the umpire would get nothing. And if only one agreed, he would get to retrieve his cash from the cap, the umpire would still get nothing, and no trade would go ahead. 

Whatever the outcome, the umpire was always incentivised to come up with as fair exchange as possible, and the trade would only go ahead once everyone was happy. 

So how does an obscure mediaeval trading system lead us to the word handicap as we have it today? Well, it was the idea of assessing the worth of something, just as the umpire did, that led to the idea of “handicap” horse races, in which an adjudicator is brought in to assess the quality of the horses taking part. Stronger horses would be laden down with weights to hamper their speed and make for a fairer race overall. And it’s this sense of something that hampers or encumbers an ordinary activity that we’ve retained in the language today.