• phony •
Printable Version Pronunciation: fo-ni or fo-nee • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective, Noun
Meaning: 1. [Adjective] False, sham, counterfeit, not genuine. 2. [Noun] A fake or counterfeit object or person, a thing or person that is not what it seems to be.
Notes: Until J. D. Salinger's novel about phoniness, Catcher in the Rye, this was just another item in our slang vocabulary. Today many would agree that it is a standard word used in relatively formal contexts. It has a comparative, phonier, and a superlative, phoniest, and a noun, phoniness. (Look out for the replacement of Y with I.) Don't let them tell you that you can also spell it phoney. Not any more.
In Play: The similarity of today's word and (tele)phone is just too good an opportunity to pass up: "As soon as I sit down for dinner, I begin receiving calls from those telephonies trying to sell me a vacation home in the desert." To Americans, phony money sounds too much like funny money not to make the switch. Phony has always been and remains a playful word open a wide spectrum of fun.
Word History: Today's Good Word has nothing to do with telephones but instead derives from an old con used by British confidence men built a round a ring called a 'fawney'. In this con, a 'fawney dropper' drops a gilded brass ring which an accomplice picks up just in front of the targeted victim. The ring is then offered to the victim for far less than its apparent value but far more than the real value. The ring was called a fawney from the Irish word for "ring", fáinne. (If this history strikes you as a bit phony, don't let it worry you— it is an established fact.)
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