In the past, we've explored the origins of some popular and idiosyncratic idioms, but for every true story, there's a false one that sometimes becomes more popular than the truth. So today, we're putting on our debunking hats and setting about correcting a few myths about language and communication, whether they're false acronyms, bogus word origins, or even a few misconceptions about nonverbal communication.
10. Gentlemen only, ladies are not allowed
An acronym is a type of abbreviation that takes the initial letters of a series of words and pronounces them as one word, like NASA or NATO. And here's a fun fact: If the letters in the new word are pronounced individually, rather than as one word, like FBI or KFC, it's an initialism, not an acronym.
But back to our main point: there is a popular belief that the word "golf" is also an abbreviation meaning "gentlemen only, no ladies allowed." This sounds plausible, since women were traditionally discouraged from playing the sport, but not only is it a lie, it is based on an old joke that has been repeated so often that people have come to accept it as true.
Generally, English abbreviations are a relatively recent practice, only lasting a century and a half or so. So if a word is older, it's probably not an abbreviation, and the word "golf" has been around for at least 600 years. The earliest written reference to it is in an act of King James II in 1457, when he effectively banned it because he thought it was discouraging people from practicing archery.
As for the actual origins of the word, that's a little murkier. Some say it comes from a Scots word, others from a Dutch one. We just know it's not an acronym.
9. Blair Mountain Rednecks
Another word of uncertain origin is “redneck,” used in a derogatory sense as a synonym for “hillbilly” or “redneck.” On the one hand, the word “hillbilly” has a rich origin that links it to the Battle of Blair Mountain, a notorious and violent event that to this day represents the largest labor uprising in U.S. history. On the other hand, history is not entirely accurate.
In August 1921, about 10,000 West Virginia miners clashed with lawmen and strikebreakers to prevent their attempts to unionize. It was part of a larger series of labor conflicts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries known as the Coal Wars.
The striking miners wore red bandanas around their necks and became known as the "Red Neck Army," and the men themselves eventually became known simply as rednecks. It's a pretty compelling story, and all of it is true, except that it's the origin of the word "redneck," which goes back even further than the Battle of Blair Mountain.
As we said at the outset, we're not sure where the word "redneck" comes from, but we do know that the Oxford English Dictionary contains usages of it dating back decades before the labor revolt, even going back to the late 19th century.
8. Turning "crap" into "crap"
While we're on the subject of fake word origins that have stuck simply because people like the story behind them, let's talk about the words "crap" and "shit," supposedly named after flush toilet inventor Thomas Crapper.
This is a two-pronged myth. The first misconception is that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. He didn’t. It’s true that he was a real plumber who later opened his own company and that he had several plumbing-related patents, but none as grand as the flush toilet system. Sir John Harrington was the first to describe a flush toilet back in 1596, but he never actually built one. Then Alexander Cummings was the first to receive a patent for one in 1775. Both of them were working centuries before Thomas Crapper ran his company in the late 19th century.
As for the word "shit," it is even older and may come from medieval Latin, Old French, or even Dutch, as they all have similar-sounding words. The connection between "shit" and Thomas Crapper was made in 1969 by writer Wallace Rayburn, who wrote the satirical book ""Blushing with pride" , so it looks like this is another case of people taking a joke and accepting it as fact.
7. Spanish "lisp"
This is a myth that most people will come across if they study Spanish long enough. The idea is that there was once a Spanish king, commonly called Ferdinand, who spoke with a lisp. Wanting to curry favor with the king, his courtiers began to imitate him, and before you know it, the entire country was speaking like him, and the so-called Spanish lisp was born.
Once again, we have a myth that needs to be debunked on two fronts. First, the very existence of the Spanish lisp. Lisp is a speech impediment, and to suggest that an entire nation could suffer from a collective verbal disorder is nonsense. There are some differences between the way some European Spanish and Latin American Spanish words are pronounced, but these are simple differences in language, just like the differences between British and American English.
Then there’s the story of the lisping king. No such Spanish monarch has ever been identified. The closest we have is courtesy of the 14th-century historian Pedro Lopez de Ayala, who wrote of King Peter the Cruel of Castile and Leon that he spoke “with a slight lisp.” However, there’s no record of anyone ever imitating him, let alone the entire kingdom.
6. Start spreading the NEWS
Moving on to another fake acronym, the word “news,” which, oddly enough, has not one but two false explanations. Some say it means “north, east, west, and south,” because it brings you information from all over the world. Others say it actually means “notable events, weather, and sports.”
In fact, neither is true. "News" doesn't mean anything. It's simply the plural of "new," and it dates back to the 14th century. The plural form was used to mean "new things," inspired by the French wordnew and German Neues.
5. California Code 420
Many groups of people have their own languages, codes, and other ways of secretly communicating with each other. This can be anything from a complex cipher to a simple reference that only a select few will understand. Nowadays, everyone and their grandmother knows that “420” is a weed that refers to smoking marijuana. It has become so common in pop culture that April 20th is even an unofficial holiday dedicated to marijuana.
But there was a time when the term was far more mysterious. After all, it was supposed to be a secret. The most plausible origin of the story traces back to a group of high school kids named “the Valdos” who attended San Rafael High School in California in 1971. “420 Louie,” as it was originally code, referred to their plan to meet at 4:20 p.m. in front of the school’s statue of Louis Pasteur to unwind with a quick doobie, or whatever the kids called it back in the day. Eventually, the term was shortened to “420,” and it became widely used by their extended circle of friends. This happened to several members of the Grateful Dead, who further spread the term’s use among their legions of fans, known as the Deadheads.
It was only almost two decades later, in 1990, that the magazine High Times told the story of "420" to the world... except they were wrong because they claimed "420" referred to California's police code for smoking marijuana... which is not true. Or alternatively, the state's penal code for smoking marijuana. Which, again, is not true. This particular penal code that exists pertains to unlawfully obstructing a person's access to a public place. It wasn't until 1997 that some of the former Waldos got in touch with High Times, to clarify the situation, but by that time the myth had already become firmly established.
4. Freezing monkey balls
We’ve already covered a few incorrect word origins, but what about idioms? If, for example, you find yourself shivering in sub-zero temperatures, you might exclaim that it’s “cold enough to freeze a brass monkey’s balls off.” It’s a great expression, and it even has a great origin story. During the Age of Sail, brass monkeys were metal trays with indentations that were used on ships to stack cannonballs in a pyramid shape. However, when it got really cold, the brass would shrink more than the iron cannonballs, causing the cannonballs to fall all over the deck.
Unfortunately, while this is a compelling story, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. For one thing, ships didn't store their cannonballs on deck where they could rust. They had special lockers for them. Even if they did, they certainly wouldn't stack them in a precarious pyramid shape that would probably collapse when passing over even a small wave. And even if they did all that for some reason, physics would still ruin the party, because the difference between the coefficients of expansion of brass and iron is negligible, not enough to make monkey balls tumble.
3. Save our syntax
When it comes to non-verbal communication, Morse code is without a doubt one of the most well-known systems. We’ve all heard of it, and while most of us probably don’t know how to use it, we do know one key phrase: dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot – SOS.
It’s been the international distress signal for over a hundred years. Of course, we now have quicker and easier ways to signal for help, but SOS remains ingrained in the public consciousness. But what does it mean? “Save our souls” is the most common response, although “save our ship” is a close second. But the truth is that SOS doesn’t mean anything, and that was the point. It was a simple, elegant, unmistakable code sequence. It was specifically chosen so that it could be transmitted without pause and repeated every few seconds without the possibility of being misinterpreted as another message.
2. Baptized at Ellis Island.
In 1892, the United States opened its first federal immigration station at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, where over the next six decades more than 12 million immigrants were processed. Unfortunately, these immigrants lost something very important to them during their passage through Ellis Island: their names. Immigration officials often changed their names to something that sounded more American: Schmidt became Smith, Noblinsky became Noble, Weber became Weaver, and so on. Other times, they did it because they couldn’t communicate with immigrants who didn’t speak English, or even simply because they couldn’t write foreign names. And just like that, with the stroke of a pen, a person’s entire identity was erased. It’s a widely circulated story that has been recounted in the media many times, most famously in Part II "The Godfather" . But is this true?
Of the millions of people, it is of course possible that some may have been changed due to some mistake, but this was certainly not a common practice, and government records show that people left Ellis Island with the same names they entered. Many immigrants decided to change their names later to fit in more easily.
Contrary to popular belief, Ellis Island employed translators in every major language to communicate with immigrants who didn’t speak English. And even if they weren’t there, it didn’t matter. Officials didn’t need to talk to immigrants to find out who they were—they had the ship’s manifest, which already had everyone’s name written down. The inspection at Ellis Island was mainly to make sure immigrants had papers and that they had passed a physical.
1. Turning the bird over in the Middle Ages
We will end our list with the myth of the origin of the most famous and widely recognized gesture in the world – the middle finger. It is said that it was first used as a taunt by English soldiers after fighting the French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. a powerful and formidable weapon that was feared by all of Europe. The French were very favored by the victory in this battle, and according to the myth, they intended to cut off the middle fingers of all captured English soldiers so that they would no longer be able to draw the longbow.
History buffs will know that the English gave the French a good spanking at the Battle of Agincourt. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, they all waved their middle fingers as the French army retreated to show that their fingers were still firmly attached to their hands.
There are two problems with this story. The first is practical – no one would pay ransom to archers who couldn’t shoot a longbow. As harsh as it sounds, archers weren’t very high up in the military hierarchy, and archers who could no longer fight were pretty much useless. If the French had really intended to cut off their fingers, they would have known that the English wouldn’t want them back.
The second problem is historical. There is plenty of evidence that the middle finger has been a rude gesture for much longer than medieval England. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Germanic tribesmen taunted Roman soldiers with the middle finger. And before them, the philosopher Diogenes used the same gesture on the orator Demosthenes, back in 4th-century BC Athens. So it seems that people have been insulting each other with the middle finger for thousands of years.
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