P

Pass the buck
This idiom, which means ‘to pass responsibility to someone else’, comes from poker. The buck was placed in front of a player as a reminder that he had to declare the first stake. This was rather an unfavourable position. Later, the buck, and thus the responsibility to declare, was passed on to another player. What exactly the buck was is not clear, either a buckhorn knife or a silver dollar, a ‘buck’. Americans still refer to dollars as bucks. Today you find the idiom in utterances like this: ‘ But the states must also accept their responsibility and not try to pass the buck onto the Federal Government’. President Truman is said to have had a sign on his desk in the White house which said: ‘The buck stops here’. Today the idiom is also used in this form. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 41)

Pavement
The British equivalent of American sidewalk and Australian footpath. In this sense, a relatively new word, first being recorded in the OED in 1874, the other words being common in Britain when America and Australia and New Zealand were settled. This is an example of what is somewhat misleadingly called ‘colonial lag´, misleading because it gives the impression that the colonial variety will or should one day catch up with the home variety. (Bauer 2002: 5)

Paw, pour, poor
Older speakers of RP would distinguish between all these three, with pour being pronounced /p � «/ and poor being pronounced /p U «/ and paw being pronounced
/p � ù/. In the pronunciation of most middle and younger generation RP speakers, the diphthong of pour does not longer exist and has been replaced by the monophthong of paw, which interestingly has also ousted the diphthong of poor. Thus, whereas older speakers have three different pronunciations for the three words, in the speech of younger people they may all sound the same! (Davis 2004: 45)

Pay on the nail
In the city centre of Bristol, there are four bronze pillars in the shopping precinct near the Stock Exchange. You wonder what they are doing there. They rather look like tall round tables with a flat surface on which you can park your pint when drinking outside. That is quite handy, but it is not their original purpose. They are there as a reminder of an idiom. Actually, they are the objects from which an idiom, to pay on the nail, is believed to derive. By a stretch of the imagination, the pillars look somewhat like giant nails. The idea is this: when you struck a bargain, you paid by placing your money on these nails, so you paid on the spot and in cash, and that is the meaning of “pay on the nail”. There is only one snag: the idiom is older than the nails, so it may well be that they owe their existence to the idiom and not the other way round. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 133)

Pen
The pen was traditionally made from the feather of a bird, a goose, a crow or a swan, and that is where it got its name from, the Latin word for feather being penna. The word stuck even after the bird feather was replaced by metal in the ball-point pen and even when it disappeared altogether in the modern pen, the biro. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2005: 282)

Perennial
This is one the many words that do not mean what they ‘ought to’ mean, considering their origin. It is composed of Latin per + annus and thus means ‘throughout the year’, not ‘everlasting’. Still, the second sense has now become the norm.

Pineapple
In his song „English is crazy“, Pete Seeger wonders why in a pineapple there is neither pine nor apple.

Pink-collar Jobs
These are low-paid jobs, mainly for women, such as cleaners, hairdressers, waitresses. The phrase was coined in analogy with blue-collar workers, warehousemen, longshoremen, mechanics, construction workers and other manual workers. This in its turn was coined in analogy with white-collar workers, professionals and people who work in offices. Rather a nice example, I think, of how language is creative, using old bits to create something new. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 19)

Pipe
A word with a truly intriguing history. Its origin is onomatopoeic. It is the imitation of bird call in Latin. Its origin lie in Latin pipare, ‘chirp’, used to describe the repetitive pi-pi sound made by young birds (cf. German piep, piep!). Later, the word pipa developed from this and was applied to denote a musical instrument. Why was that? Well, because pipes were used to imitate birds in order to trap them. This came into English as pipe. But that is not the end of the story. The word then, because of the similarities, also became used to describe another hollow tube you stick into your mouth, just like the musical instrument, and you fill it with tobacco, and finally a hollow tube which carries water, a pipeline. All this because of a bird call. (Flavell & Flavell 2005: 75)

Please
When discussing the experiments carried out in teaching animals human language, students often make this point: the animals, in this case chimpanzees, did not “understand the meaning of “please”, they just used it because they knew that if they used it they would get what they wanted, a banana or an ice-cream. Were the animals just drilled to use certain symbols, were they just conditioned without any “real” learning taking place? This is a valid point, and one that is crucial in the criticism of all such experiments. The question the students do not generally ask, however, is this: do we know the meaning of “please”? It seems to be taken for granted that we do. But: what is the meaning of “please”? Can we define it without reference to its social function, without reference to it as a tool to make our requests more successful? Perhaps, at least in this respect, we are not so different from the monkeys. We also use “please” in order to get what we want. In a way, we have also been conditioned into using it to improve our chances. On the other hand, there are two important differences between the monkeys and us. We are likely to use variation, sometimes including “please” in our requests, sometimes not, and we can also replace “please” by other forms. And, of course, we can speak about language, think about language, discuss our use of language, as we do when we criticise the way monkeys use the word please.

Pocket
English does not have many diminutives, and those that is has are hardly recognizable as such. Words like piglet or leaflet formally have the diminutive –let – after all, a piglet is a small pig – but they are ‘petrified’ and a far cry from diminutives proper as you find them in Russian or Spanish or, to a lesser degree, in German (-lein , -chen ). Originally, the word pocket was also a diminutive. It was a small poke, and a poke was a sack. The diminutive is now an everyday word, whereas poke only survives in the idiom “pig in a poke”. If you buy a pig in a poke, you buy something without having examined it properly beforehand. This comes from old country fairs, in which suckling pigs were sold. The trader would have one pig on show whereas the rest would be ready to be sold in pokes. Not all traders were honest, and if you were unlucky, or unwise, you discovered later that the poke contained a cat, not a pig. The origin of the idiom may be old, but the idiom may not be out of date in the days of internet shopping and the like. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 146)

Poison

English makes a distinction between poison and venom. But what exactly is the difference? It is nothing to do with plants and animals, as one may think. It is entirely due to the way the species uses its defence mechanisims. If it is injected – as through a snake’s bite or a bee’s sting – it is venom. If it is secreted through the skin – as is the case with certain species of frogs – it is poison.

Polite
One would probably speak of something like polite behaviour or a polite remark, but hardly of a polite poem. Yet in the 18th century, the ‘age of politeness’, this was perfectly normal, polite being used for anything that was intelligible and acceptable. A polite lecture would be on which avoided specialised or arcane learning ( Crystal 2005: 371). We could sometimes use this kind of politeness in our times.

Potato (1)
English has borrowed this word from Spanish. Other examples include guitar, cargo, embargo, Negro, siesta, tobacco, tornado, cockroach. (Jucker 2000: 51)

Potato (2)
When pronouncing the word in connected speech, the first vowel is often left out. This process, called elision, is normal enough, although native speakers are generally quite unaware of it. In this case, it has a special effect: it violates the phonotactic rule of English which says that the combination /pt/ is not allowed in English at the beginning of words. The same is incidentally true of connect. (McMahon 2002: 129)

Potus

Potus, Flotus, Scotus. Sound at best like a medical term for certain parts of the body, if not like swearwords or words designating venereal diseases. However, none of this is the case. These terms actually refer to institutions high up in the political system of the US: Potus stands for ‘President of the United States’, Flotus for ‘First Lady of the United States’ and Scotus for ‘Supreme Court of the United States’. Though they are found spelt like this, it is common practice to use capitalization all through in order to show they are acronyms: POTUS, FLOTUS, SCOTUS. (Hudson 2016)

Prime Minister

Every use of language involves choice. If a newspaper article speaks of Tony Blair and then later refers to him as The Prime Minister, it makes a choice in favour of one phrase and against others: Tony – Tony Blair – Mr Blair – The Head of Her Majesty’s government – The present incumbent of 10 Downing Street – our Tony – Bush’s poodle and many others. (Widdowson 2007: 68)

Prince
What is the difference in pronunciation between prince and prints? In very careful speech, there is a /t/ in prints but not in prince. In casual speech, the /t/ is often dropped. This is a very common case of elision, one of three successive consonants being dropped. This would make prints sound the same as prince. To complicate things just a little bit more, in casual speech many speakers include a /t/ in prince. This process, known as epenthesis, works in exactly the opposite direction to that of middle consonant elision. Thus, paradoxically, prince can sound like prints and prints like prince. (Davis 2004: 139)

Pronounciate

The word *pronounciate does not form part of the average English speaker’s vocabulary. It is, however, found in foreign language students’ essays. It rather nicely illustrates how certain words are formed. This particular process is called back-formation: you take a word, clip the suffix and get a new word (editor > edit), the ‘opposite’ process of derivation, where you add the suffix to a word to get a new word (work > worker). It may sometimes not be easy to decide which is which, you would have to know something about the history of the word. So *pronounciate is actually the result of quite a creative process. Unluckily (for the students), the English language has not discovered it yet.

Proofreader

What does a proofreader prove? Nothing really, at least not in the modern sense of prove. Here, the original meaning of the word is preserved, the meaning of Latin probare, the word from which it derives: ‘test’, ‘examine’. So the proofreader checks the text, examines it. This is also why an exception proves the rule. It does not certify that the rule is correct, it puts it to the test. It may destroy the rule, or the rule may survive. In either case, the rule has been proved. (Forsyth 2016: 19-20)

Propaganda
The word has its roots in horticulture. You propagated plants rather than ideas. The use of the word with respect to ideas goes back to the Roman Catholic Church’s attempt to convert native peoples to Christianity. This task was entrusted to the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. First it referred to this particular organisation, then it was applied to other organisations which spread a particular doctrine, then to the programme which contained these ideas and finally to the material used to spread these ideas. On its way, the word, which was first neutral, became a disparaging term. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2005: 176-7)

Prostitute

In ancient Rome, women did not use to have jobs at all. In fact, the only women who had jobs in Rome were those stood in front of brothels waiting for customers. They were standing in front of buildings, pro-stitutio. (Forsyth 2016: 220)

Pudding
Now usually sweet, but until the 19th century, when it was discovered that you could cook things in cloth, virtually anything cooked in gut. A rather nice example of narrowing of meaning. The old meanings are still present in Yorkshire Pudding and black pudding, two of the highlights of English cuisine, batter baked in an oven and a type of dark sausage made from blood. The newer meaning of something sweet is present when the word stands for dessert, but the meaning is at the same time widened in referring to a whole dish and not just to what you actually eat. Originally, before it became customary – not so long ago – to have different dishes following one another, you would get several puddings, savoury and sweet, at the same time, still the best way of serving food if you ask me, which – needless to say – nobody ever does.

Pupil
The word has two meanings, ‘schoolchild’ and ‘part of the eyeball’. These two meaning are historically related, though they have diverged through time so much that no speaker of English would think of them as being historically related. This is why, in this and other cases, it is not always easy to decide if a word is homonymous or polysemous, i.e. whether we should speak of two words with the same form or of one word with two meanings. (Lyons 1981: 147)

Putz

“Only the chosen few can afford to have a really impressive putz which fills half the room.” This affirmation appeared in the New York Times Magazine with reference decorative nativity scenes which, in Pennsylvania Dutch, are called putz. The editor was probably not aware of another, unrelated putz, a word which means ‘simpleton’ and as such is inoffensive. At the same time, it is a vulgar word meaning ‘penis’. The sentence from the New York Times Magazines acquires quite an unexpected sense that way. (O’Conner 2010: 44-45)