David Cameron: Tory or outlaw?
Photograph: PA
In the wake of David Cameron's victory, our resident logophile Sean Clarke explores the origins of the words 'posh' and 'Tory'.

Saluting the black new dawn for British politics on Tuesday afternoon, I was moved to reflect that "posh Tory" is now a tautology, whereas once it would have been an oxymoron. As is so often the case, I was only half right.

The word Tory, I remembered, was from an Irish word meaning outlaw - hardly the activity of a posho. The dictionaries differ on which word to trace it back to: variously, toraidhe (my favourite for no reasons other than gut feeling), toruighe and toiridhe. Whichever, the consensus is that the word initially referred, about the turn of the 17th century, to disposessed Catholics in Ireland who, having been turfed off their land by the English crown, turned outlaws. It later came to apply to those who supported the bid of James, Duke of York, to succeed Charles II. James being a Catholic, it was assumed he would restore his coreligionists to their lands, and it was further guessed that anyone who supported the prince supported the outlaws by extension.

This assumption was heightened when James inherited the throne as James II (and VII, for any Scots pedants out there). With the Declaration of Indulgence offering toleration to his Catholic subjects, and his absolutist leanings, the King aroused the suspicion of parliament, leading eventually to his replacement with William of Orange. From 1689, with James gone, the term was applied to a political party, at least partly made up of former Jacobites, which had a general disposition toward monarchist (rather than parliamentarian) tendencies and the still-current Tory position that things were better in the old days.

(I make no pretence at objectivity here, but it's interesting to note that, on this matter, objectivity is in pretty poor supply even in dictionary definitions. The Collins Etymological Dictionary refers to the Tories' opponents, the Whigs, as a party "who favoured reforms and progress", although it's perfectly possible to paint them as Protestant bigots who would rather have a Dutchman, or later a German, on the throne than suffer a papist. The Chambers English Dictionary meanwhile says Tory came to mean "the most hot-headed of the supporters of the royal prerogative".)

Of course, beyond the original term meaning outlaw, everyone involved in this is posh; the dispossessed Irish Catholics were Catholic landholders, and the Jacobite supporters in England were largely noblemen. It's wonderful to think of them, swanning around Whitehall in their wigs, referring to each other as the 17th century equivalents of "rude boys"; shades of Hague at Notting Hill, perhaps.

So "Tory" develops from rude boy to posh boy, but posh, if anything, goes the other way. Nobody's very sure about where it comes from, but the most plausible suggestion is that it derives from a Romany word meaning a half, which is then applied to a small coin (say, a ha'penny) and then to money generally. Then sometime in the early part of the last century, it comes to mean a dandy (turning up in PG Wodehouse as "push") and from there to the word we know and love today. (The one thing most etymologists agree on is that posh has nothing to do with the initial letters of "port out, starboard home", supposedly the most comfortable way to travel to India as your cabin would be facing north - and therefore cooler - on both legs. It's hard to know where to start with this one, apart from with the consideration that the first half of the outward journey was sailing mostly due south toward the Cape of Good Hope, and due north on the way back.)

One last note. Given Cameron's royal pedigree, he might like Collins's suggestion for the origin of the word toff: possibly from tuft - "nickname for a titled student at Oxford University, wearing a cap with a gold tassel."