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I love your love of words :) …

Comment posted Phoney by moshimoshi.

I love your love of words But I think you’ve jumped the gun with this one. Faux is the more likely precursor of phoney. ‘That’s terribly faux’ (as people indeed used to say) becomes ‘that’s terribly phoney’. The fawney-rig idea is colourful and memorable but it’s folk etymology and unlikely. When you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense that a cant word (criminal slang) would be widely known. Cant is meant to be code. It also doesn’t make sense that it would reappear in a new spelling in a new country over a century later with nothing in between. There’s no occurrence of fawney being used to mean fake in general, it only describes this type of fraud in a very limited setting. All the references to this etymology in dictionaries are prefaced with ‘possibly’. Generally if the etymology involves an entertaining story, someone’s just made it up. Faux on the other hand does simply mean fake.

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