Two rules of grammar are certain: never split an infinitive and never end a sentence with a preposition. As for the origins of words, it is universally known that the origin of posh is from ships’ tickets to and from India stamped ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’. None of this triad of certainties is true. Let me touch upon posh, about which I wrote here in 2002.
Since then, the admirable philologist Michael Quinion has published a book called Port Out, Starboard Home, a title emblematic of popular etymology. He doesn’t think that this was the origin of posh, of course. No one has ever found such a ticket or any reference in shipping archives.
I hadn’t realised that in that minor classic from 1892, The Diary of a Nobody, the character Murray Posh (a friend of Mr Pooter’s son Lupin, and, it turns out, connected to ‘Posh’s three-shilling hats’) predates by a good two decades the first known use of posh in print.
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