Wordorigins.org

POSH - Travelling from Portsmouth/Southampton to Egypt was extremely popular in the late 19th, early 20th century.  For those with money and influence; who didn’t want the heat of the sun on them during the trip.  They would book passage as “Port Out, Starboard Home”, ergo the acronym POSH

"One for the road” refers to a pint of ale, given to the condemned man (by a well meaning Publican) on the road from The Tower of London to the chopping block about 200 yards away.  The condemned man was expected to pay for his own execution by the crown. (And to ensure the ‘Chop’ was a clean one)

It would be better to post comments on individual words and phrases in the relevant articles, as opposed to this welcome message. The discussion forum is there as well.

As for the POSH suggestion, it is thoroughly debunked in the entry for “posh.”

I don’t have an entry for “one for the road,” but the Tower of London suggestion is plainly absurd. The phrase refers to nothing more than a drink before departing a bar/party/etc. and it does not appear before the mid-20th century.

I typed in the word’alleged’ searching for the orgin.  While the responses returned are amusing and engaging, I don’t see the word origin.  Am I just a dumb beginning user?

I don’t have an entry for “alleged,” or for a lot of other common words. The best place to look for origins of common words is a good dictionary. I focus on slang and phrase origins as these are less likely to be found in standard dictionaries.

But now that I look up “allege,” I see that it has a rather complex origin. I’ll do a write up in the next few days. It’s too complex and subtle an origin for a brief comment to the welcome page to do it justice.

Fans of word origins might like to know of a pretty new, similar-but-different site, FirstMention.com

http://firstmention.com/default.aspx

FirstMention.com finds the earliest use in print of common words and phrases, like “Grand Canyon”, “Elvis Presley”, “microwave oven”, and “best thing since sliced bread”.

Hope you and your readers enjoy it.

David

One phrase that I’ve been looking for lately and have found little to no information on is “For shits and giggles.” Some friends of mine and I are curious as to the origin and basic google searches did nothing to help find where that relatively (I would imagine) phrase came from.

Maybe you’d be able to shed some light on it?

David M. it would be better to ask about “shits and giggles” in the discussion area which is linked on the right side of this page.

But it is a vulgarized form of “kicks and giggles” and I don’t think that there is a traceable history for that.