wharfs and ****

[flashpig]

On a thames cruise I heard the origin of wharf as 'WareHouse At River Front'. This is ********. But I also heard a similar type person saying that *** stood for 'Westernised Oriental Gentleman'. Come on. This is rubbish too right?

[secretspirit]

Don't know about the first one but as to the second there was a book review in the Mail On Sunday today about the origins of words and it said that was untrue, just as lots of words that are supposed to be made up of initials are also not really.

[Hippy]

Wharf is an old word and in English derives from late Old English "hwearf", corresponding with Middle Low German "warf" and "werf" and is the source for the Dutch "werf" meaning shipyard, and German "Werft" meaning the same.(New Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

Beware of explanations giving initial letters of phrases to make words. This sort of thing is very recent, I think only form around the beginning of 20th century. It is amost always confined to quasi-technical terms, such as "CADCAM" Computer Aided Design and Comuter Aided Manufacture, and neologoisms, such as "NATO" North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and "RADAR" RAdio Detection And Ranging.

[Hippy]

Ooops, let's edit that to read "neologisms" from Greek "neo" = new "logos" = word and "ismos" = forming a noun from an action.

[BASSTETT]

*** it stands for worthy oriental gentleman - the term is actually mentioned in wilbur smiths - blue horizon

[TommyC]

HMMmm.. 'Fraid not, Basstett... I'm not exactly Methuselah, but I can categorically assure you that the label in question is VERY much older than any of Wilbur Smith's work - and I'm sure hs would be the very first to acknowledge that. As has already been indicated here, the trend towards inventing wholly bogus initials for the origins of offensive names is very recent, and is all part-and-parcel of this country's suffocating and nonsensical political correctness. The word simply originated as an offhand, derogatory colonial label for the dark-skinned natives of central and east Africa and, of course, India, and the attempt at ill-fitting initialisation was a very much later attempt in a changing political climate to gloss over the painful reality of how colonial life HAD once been.