One of this week’s Wordle (a popular online word gameanswers was PSHAW. It defeated everyone in my WhatsApp group, and my brother confessed he had never heard of it either (but my mother, an ex-English teacher and great reader was surprised he didn’t know). My confident explanation was that it is a “Jeeves word”. That turns out not to be quite true, but it wasn’t entirely wrong either.
Jeeves, for those unfamiliar with him, is the clever valet in P. G. Wodehouse’s stories, forever rescuing his amiable but hopeless employer, Bertie Wooster from social disasters.
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) wrote for more than seventy years, yet his characters remained linguistically embedded in Edwardian England before the First World War, speaking in upper-class slang with expressions such as “What ho!” and “By Jove!”
But there was one problem with my explanation. Pshaw isn’t really a Wodehouse word.
Pshaw is an interjection—a stand-alone word that expresses a reaction rather than conveys information. It means something like “nonsense!”, “ridiculous!” or “I don’t believe it!”
Interjections are grammatically independent—they don’t need to connect to a sentence and often stand alone with an exclamation mark after them. Examples include Ouch!, Wow!, Oh! Modern examples of “pshaw” are “Pfft!”, “Meh!”, “Yeah, right” and “As if”.
Pshaw first appeared in late 17th century English perhaps from Dutch. It probably came into being as an imitation of a sound, essentially onomatopoeic—a representation of the puff of air someone makes when dismissing an idea. It may come from Dutch expressions such as pscha or p’shaw. English borrowed many colloquial expressions from Dutch through trade and naval contact at that time.
English has very few native words starting with ps-. Most—psychology, psalm, pseudo—are borrowed from Greek, where the p was originally pronounced. Pshaw is different because its “ps” captures the sound of expelled breath.
Pshaw was very much an eighteenth and nineteenth-century word (more Victorian than Edwardian). English novelists used it because it instantly identified someone as confident, educated and slightly pompous. It became almost a stock expression for the characters of military officers, doctors, magistrates and elderly uncles. Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes use it:
“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! ” he says to Watson demonstrating his characteristic pomposity.
But by the time of Wodehouse it had begun to sound old-fashioned. Today it survives mainly in historical novels, comic writing and deliberately old-fashioned dialogue.
So my justification for calling it a “Jeeves word”? Wodehouse’s humour comes from preserving a slightly old-fashioned, naïve version of pre-WWI England speech. Bertie Wooster says “What ho!” in the 1930s, long after real English people had stopped greeting each other that way.
But, although “pshaw” is not a Wodehouse word it almost could have been. Rupert Psmith, a monocle-wearing Old Etonian is another large character in the world of Jeeves. The P in his surname is silent and he had added it to his name to distinguish him from other Smiths as there were too many of them. Pshaw!