People are always surprised to learn that dictionary editors aren’t strict grammarians, the unbending defenders of some frozen version of the English language.
I was, too, when I started working my marketing job at Oxford Dictionaries. The editors’ motives were far more documentary than I’d expected. They loved words, and respected the odd ways that people used them.
For them, language was more geologic than logical, the accumulated sediment and errata of history and human thought. The editors sifted through the evidence to identify patterns of meaning and attempt to tell us about them.
Given the scientific angle, the editors were frustrated when people butted into their objective discourse with invented rules and regulations (the “grammar Nazis”) or false etymologies.
Oh, those false etymologies.
A false etymology is, at heart, a great story. A lesson or judgment or irony. There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to them, which is delightful or mortifying, depending on whether or not you are a dictionary editor.
It’s delightful for most of us because a false etymology like the not-actually-real acronym of posh (“port outbound, starboard home”) suggests something specific and funny about the nitpickiness of wealthy British travelers.
But the tidiness of false etymologies belies the actual complexity of language—and the struggle of editors to corral it. Language is messy and strange, lacking a neatness we’re always tempted to pin to it.
Taylor Coe 