And I guess A.P. is short for 'Always Prevaricating'

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on September 08, 2010 at 10:55 AM, updated September 08, 2010 at 9:37 PM

seaside-heights-boardwalk.JPGBennies on the boardwalk

In this otherwise informative piece on names for Jersey Shore tourists, a reporter for the A.P. makes the common mistake of accepting a folk etymology for the term "bennie."

The reporter writes:

"In northern shore towns, they're called Bennies (an acronym for "Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark and New York" or variations thereof.)"

It's bad enough when newspaper readers do this sort of thing. A newspaper writer should know better. There are entire websites devoted to debunking false  etymologies.  And no such etymology is more obviously false than one which assigns words to every letter of a common word, such as "Constable On Patrol" for "cop" or "Port Out, Starboard Home" for "posh."

This sort of thing is called a "backronym," and I wrote about it in July. I guess this reporter doesn't read my blog, but he should read the New York Times Magazine language column, where Ben Zimmer deal with this very subject recently in a piece wittily titled "Beach Blanket Lingo."

 Zimmer wrote that the first theory for the origin of "bennie" appeared in print in 1978:



Zimmer, who also writes for the Language Log blog, goes on to conclude that the origin can probably never be known. That is the case with many slang words, for the simple reason that they are in oral use for so years before anyone writes them down. If the pros confess they can't figure out an origin, why are so many amateurs so absolutely positive they know?

Anyone who writes for a living should be familiar with the process employed by the the Oxford English Dictionary. Tracking down the meaning of a word requires an exhaustive search through great numbers of sources. What seems like an obvious origin is very often false.

By the way, just what does A.P. stand for?