Are you posh or not?
Now, a lot of you have met me, and a lot of you have spoken to me on the phone. So you’re not going into this having never met me – am I posh? This became the topic of conversation at lunch time. Jess, one time Laundry lady, rates people’s poshness on a scale of how many ponies she thinks they should own. Apparently, I rate at 1.5 ponies, which is relatively high – you have to be posh to even register on the scale in the first place.
I protested against this – I’m not posh, I’m just well spoken! But it got me thinking, what does posh mean? And why do we see it as such a bad thing to be posh?
Posh can mean smart or fashionable, sumptuous or luxurious (Hmm, so maybe I’m fashionable, I don’t mind that so much!). Apparently in the twenties, it was also used
as an exclamation of contempt or disgust – can’t you just see those flappers stepping in dog poo and exclaiming ‘oh posh!’.
The origin of the word is obscure. There’s an urban myth that the word is an acronym from port out(ward), starboard home, said to be the preferred accommodation on ships traveling between England and India, however this is without foundation and might just have been made up. ‘Posha dandy’ is recorded as British slang in 1890, so it seems likely that posh that we use today comes from ‘dandy’.
Hmph. Dandy refers to a man who is excessively concerned about his clothes and appearance; a fop. I’m not flattered by this name!
Another word posh was 19th- and early 20th-century British slang for “money,” specifically “a halfpenny, cash of small value.” This word is borrowed from the Romany word påšh, “half,” which was used in combinations such as påšhera, “halfpenny.” So maybe because of the association with money, posh came to mean rich as it does today. Or it may come from the slang “pot” (= “big”, “a person of importance”). Or it may be a contraction of “polished”.
Other uses of Posh: for some reason (can anyone enlighten me?) Peterborough United are called Posh, and in America it can range from Prevention of Sexual Harassment (eek) to Probability of Severe Hail (ooh). There is of course also Posh, her of Spice Girls, David Beckham and size zero fame.
I think posh-ness now is used to mean rich people, which I suppose might have an implication of spoilt-ness with it, hence why I protested at being called posh – I don’t own one pony, let alone one and a half! I think luxurious still holds as well – think of things like posh frocks and posh nosh.
There was only one way to settle this. In a moment of idle googling I stumbled across The Posh Test, and discovered that one is 27% posh! Hmm, I’m going to have get Jess to rank the pony scale again this test, but I don’t think that sounds very posh to me! Go to http://poshtest.com/quiz/ * and post the results up on the here – who’s the poshest Laundry customer?!
* test not written by us or anything to do with us, I just found it on Google!
