To be phoney (or phony if you’re in Murica), as you know, is to be fake or insincere. Like lots of our words, it’s reached us in a bit of a weird way though. And it doesn’t have anything to do with phones, as it appeared in print some 10 years before AGB (as no one calls Alexander Graham Bell) patented anything even vaguely telephone like.
Photo by Mariah Ashby on Unsplash.
Most authorities (I don’t know who these authorities are, but that’s by the by) agree that ‘phoney’ comes from an old English slang word, ‘fawney’, meaning ‘ring’ (from the Irish word ‘fainne’). Nope, still nothing to do with phones – instead this is referring to the type of ring that Beyoncé said you should have put on it, if you liked it. All this harks back to the 19th century, where English con artists ran a scam called the ‘fawney rig’ (‘rig’ is also slang, this time for ‘trick’). Here’s how it worked. The con artist would walk down a street then make a big song and dance about finding a gold ring on the ground. They’d then find a gullible passerby and reluctantly agree to sell it to them at a fraction of its actual worth. You can probably guess the rest – the conman/woman had actually dropped the ring themselves, and it was, of course, worthless. The people who carried out this scam were known as ‘fawney men’. ‘Fawney’ eventually mutated into ‘phoney’, possibly when the scam crossed to the US, and then into a synonym for anything that’s ‘false’ or ‘deceiving’.