CUID ADVANCED COURSE (16-02-2012) Advanced vocabulary: posh

posh in context: http://www.linguee.es/espanol-ingles/search?source=auto&query=posh

mamadeultramar.blogspot.com
 pijo adj [coloq.] [ES] elegante adj de lujo adj lujoso adj

ORIGIN OF POSH:

The true origin of 'posh' is uncertain. The term was used from the 1890s onward to mean a dandy. George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody, which began publication in serial form in the English satirical magazine Punch in 1888, has a character called Murray Posh, who is described as 'a swell'. The book is a satire of the times and most of the character's names are intended to match aspects of their personality, so it is quite probable that the Grossmiths used the name Posh with the meaning we currently know. The said Murray certainly looks posh enough.

The first recording of 'posh' in print that seems unequivocally to fit the current meaning of the word is a cartoon which contains this dialogue between an RAF officer and his mother, also in Punch, September 1918:

Oh, yes, Mater, we had a posh time of it down there."
"Whatever do you mean by 'posh', Gerald?"
"Don't you know? It's slang for 'swish'"

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/port%20out%20starboard%20home.html

In his 1903 Tales of St. Austin's, P. G. Wodehouse used the word 'push' to mean much the same as we now use 'posh':

"That waistcoat... being quite the most push thing of the sort in Cambridge."

Posh is also the Romany word for money and this was current throughout the 19th century. This originally meant halfpenny, which, inflation allowed for, is a long way from poshness.

The English gentlemen poet Edward Fitzgerald is another possible source of the word. He had what newspapers of the day (around 1908) described as 'most unaccountable admiration and friendship' for his boatman Joseph Fletcher, who was known as 'Posh'. In Fitzgerald's words, Posh was "A great man. A man of the finest Saxon type, blue eyes, nose less than Roman, more than Greek, and strictly auburn hair that any woman might sigh to possess". Later writers have accounted for that admiration and, in these more permissive days, it wouldn't be necessary to read between the lines of Fitzgerald's quote.

Whatever the origin is, it isn't likely to match the appeal of the P&O story and, although it is evidently wrong, that's the one that people prefer to repeat.