fake /FAYK/. adjective or noun or verb. Not genuine. A counterfeit or forgery. To pretend. To produce a counterfeit.
It’s old news to some now, but “fake news” was selected as the 2017 Word of the Year by both the Collins Dictionary and the American Dialect Society, and certainly remains a concept of vital interest regardless of where we reside on the spectrum of political disorder.
But only recently—while reading what turned out to be a Fake News story about the purportedly fake narrative of Fake News—did I start to wonder about the word fake itself.
The fine folks at the Collins Dictionary, who cared enough about the word to make it part of their word of the year, provide a few basic definitions of fake:
- As a noun or an adjective, fake refers to something that isn’t genuine, as in “my callipygous contours enjoy the feel of fake leather.”
- As a verb, to fake is to “cause something to appear more valuable or desirable … by fraud or pretense” – as in faking a signature – or to pretend to have something, as in “was she faking an accent or suffering from foreign accent syndrome” (which, if you are wondering, is totally a real thing).
The word fake is commonplace but its origins are complicated and ultimately remain a mystery. Setting aside the earliest, apparently unrelated entry in the OED of fake as a coil in a winding of rope, the first recorded, undisputed use of of fake in the way we are talking about today dates back to 1819 in James Hardy Vaux’s A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language, where he writes:
Fake: a word so variously used, that I can only illustrate it by a few examples. To fake any person or place, may signify to rob them; to fake a person, may also imply to shoot, wound, or cut; to fake a man out and out, is to kill him; a man who inflicts wounds upon, or otherwise disfigures, himself, for any sinister purpose, is said to have faked himself; if a man’s shoe happens to pinch, or gall his foot, from its being overtight, he will complain that his shoe fakes his foot sadly;
And here he reaches meanings much like ours today:
it also describes the doing of any act or the fabricating any thing, as, to fake your slangs, is to cut your irons in order to escape from custody; to fake your pin, is to create a sore leg, or to cut it, as if accidentally, with an axe, etc., in hopes to obtain a discharge from the army or navy, to get into the doctor’s list, etc.; to fake a screeve, is to write a letter, or other paper; to fake a screw, is to shape out a skeleton or false key, for the purpose of screwing a particular place; to fake a cly, is to pick a pocket; etc., etc., etc.
Incidentally, James Hardy Vaux wasn’t your ordinary lexicographer or etymologist, slumming it with slang. As he writes in the dedication to his “flash vocabulary,” he is:
~~The Author~~ (a prisoner under sentence of transportation for life) having, by an alleged act of impropriety, incurred the Governor’s displeasure, was at this period banished to Newcastle, a place of punishment for offenders: these sheets were there compiled during his solitary hours of cessation from hard labour.
And Vaux “begs” of the prison colony commander to understand that:
The idea of such a compilation first originated in the suggestion of a friend; and however the theme may be condemned as exceptionable by narrow minds, I feel confident you possess too much liberality of sentiment to reject its writer as utterly depraved, because he has acquired an extensive knowledge on a subject so obviously disgraceful. True it is, that in the course of a chequered and eventful life, I have intermixed with the most dissolute and unprincipled characters, and that a natural quickness of conception, and most retentive memory, have rendered me familiar with their language and system of operations.
Fake was well on the way to its modern meaning in a few of Vaux’s examples, but its earlier origins remain unclear despite a few prominent theories.
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “a likely source is feague ‘to spruce up by artificial means’” (or, to whip or to beat) which comes “from German fegen ‘polish, sweep,’” but also colloquially “to clear out, plunder.”
Alternatively, and also reasonably likely, fake is derived from the Latin facere (to do, make or create).
Nor does it take too dark a mind to wonder whether fake is related to that other, more prominent F-word. Anatoly Liberman—linguist, etymologist, poet, medievalist, and spelling reform advocate (hey, no one’s perfect)—suggests that fake might be a loan word of similar origin to, rather than deriving from, feague, and is part of that so-called “f-k” family of Germanic words that includes “fik” and “fak”, meaning, basically, to cheat (but not “Frick and Frack,” the Swiss Follies skating duo behind the eponymous phrase).
Regardless of its origins, fake has a long history. It turns out that Fake news, despite its recent prominence, does as well. It might feel like it was coined on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, as one bigly etymythology would have it, but the phrase fake news has been in routine use since 1890 and complaints in other forms about the phenomenon in the US can be found well before that, including a note by another American President, John Adams, who wrote “there has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in a hundred years before 1798.”
And we can go back even further. Theophrastus, the Greek philosopher who succeeded Aristotle in the year 322 BC, complained about “rumor mongers” spreading “hot” stories to credulous listeners and even described how that ancient Fake News was weaponized. Mark Antony, the ill-fated friend to Caesar who could well have been the first Roman Emperor, arguably ended his own life thanks to fake news originating with his mistress Cleopatra. The news about Fake News isn’t that it exists, but that so many people insist on the magical thinking of believing that social media will somehow do their own thinking for them.
Extras
- @FakeEtymology – “Putting the Amor in Amortization since 1066.”
- Collins and ADS Word of the Year short lists
- Foreign Accent Syndrome
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