Not bloody likely.

Dear Word Detective:  In books written by English authors, I have come across the phrase “not by a long chalk.”  This seems to mean the same thing as the American “not by a long shot.”  My son thinks this may have something to do with cannon shots, while I’m trying to factor in the old racing tote boards in English betting parlors with odds posted in chalk on high and wide boards. Probably the correct answer is “None of the above.” Help! — Alix G Benson.

Well, you never know.  It might well be “all of the above.”  According to the theory of “overdetermination,” developed by Freud to explain dreams but applied to the social realm by “Loopy Louie” Althusser and others, things don’t always happen for a single reason, but for a whole bunch of reasons, any one of which would have sufficed on its own.  The universe, in other words, is really into overkill, and this makes it very hard to figure out exactly why something happens.  Personally, I have resolved this contradiction by living in rural Ohio, where absolutely nothing ever happens.

Your hunch that “not by a long chalk,”meaning “not even by a remote chance” or “not even close” (“The big fight between inflation and deflation hasn’t been won yet, not by a long chalk,” MoneyWeek, 9/09), refers to chalk marks on a board is right on the money.  The board was most likely in a pub (where scores in darts, for instance, would be tallied) and a “long chalk” was a high score (a long series of chalk strokes), a daunting and thus unlikely obstacle for an opponent to overcome.  To say that the economy, for instance, has not yet rebounded “by a long chalk” is to say that there are huge obstacles to reaching that goal and success is far from certain.

Although “not by a long chalk” is most popular in Britain, it’s not entirely unknown here in the US, and the earliest citation for the phrase in the Dictionary of American Regional English is only slightly more recent than the first example in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But Americans are far likelier to be familiar with “not by a long shot,” used in the same sense of “don’t hold your breath.”  The term “long shot” has been used since the late 18th century to mean a shot taken with a cannon or small arms from a great distance and unlikely to hit its target.  By the mid-19th century, “long shot” was being applied to anything, from race horses to election bids, unlikely to succeed (“A few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track,” O. Henry, 1906).

The interesting thing about “not by a long shot” is that it doesn’t really match the “behind in the score” sense of “not by a long chalk.”  Instead it seems to invoke the great distance and difficulty (and consequent unlikelihood of success) of a “long shot,” which is a bit different in sense.  Or maybe I just drink too much coffee.

One intriguing possibility is that “not by a long shot” is actually the relic of a mistake.  A discussion on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society a few years ago suggested that “not by a long shot” in the US actually arose through a mis-hearing of “not by a long chalk.”  Since “long shot” meaning “remote chance” was already a popular idiom in the US, and pub tally boards were not familiar, it would have been natural to substitute “shot” for “chalk.”

The ring of hooey.

Dear Word Detective:  Why is something bogus referred to as being “phony”?  I hope this  has a more fascinating history than being the mispronunciation of an old Gaelic malt beverage or something.  Is it hilarious? — Brian Hennessey.

Hilarious?  No, but parts of it are amusing.  By the way, and this is on an entirely unrelated topic, something dawned on me last week.  There is a persistent etymological legend that the word “posh” (meaning “fancy and expensive”) was originally an acronym for “Port Out, Starboard Home,” supposedly specifying which side of the steamship had the shadier, cooler and thus preferred (and pricier) cabins on the voyage between England and India in the 1800s.  The story is bunk, and “posh” actually derives from a Romany (Gypsy) word for “money.”  But I suddenly remembered that when I was studying seamanship in my youth, we learned the phrase “Red, Right, Return” as a reminder to keep the red channel markers on your starboard (right) side when entering a harbor (and of course, the green on your left, or port side).  I suspect that the “Port Out, Starboard Home” business started as a similar mnemonic reminder to keep the red channel markers on your left (port) side leaving the harbor, and on your starboard coming home.  At some point, someone noticed that the resulting acronym “posh” also meant “ritzy,” and dreamed up a story to explain that coincidence.  I think this is almost certainly the “missing link” between “posh” meaning “fancy” and the whole topic of ocean travel.  After all, if you were sitting at your desk trying to concoct a faux etymology for “posh” meaning “fancy,” steamships would probably not be your first choice of subject.  It’s more likely you’d choose something like “Persons Owed Subservience and Humility.”

Onward.  There are a number of similarly silly stories floating around purporting to explain “phony” (or, as the Brits prefer, “phoney”) meaning, since the mid-19th century, “fake, sham, counterfeit” or “insincere” (“They had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life,” J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 1951).  My favorite is the theory that it originally referred to a widespread fear in the 1880s that the newly invented telephone would be used to deceive people.  Conversations over the new-fangled gadget were, in this tale, considered automatically untrustworthy and disparaged as “phony,” which was later applied to  anything not real or sincere.  This theory would be, perhaps, a bit more believable if “phony” had not appeared in print more than ten years before the first telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell and decades before the infernal device became common in homes.

To cut to the chase, most authorities now agree that the source of “phony” is the old English slang word “fawney,” drawn from the Irish word “fainne,” meaning “ring.”  In the 19th century, English “fawney men” (con artists) practiced a scam called the “fawney rig” (“rig” being slang for “trick”).  The trickster would make a great show of  “finding” a gold ring on the street and then agreeing to sell it to a passerby for a fraction of its worth. The ring was actually worthless brass, of course, and had been dropped on the street by the “finder” himself.  When this racket inevitably migrated to the US, “fawney” became “phony,” and we gained a very useful synonym for “fake or false.”