POTUS

West Wing viewers may be interested to read a recent entry on World Wide Words concerning the origins of the acronym POTUS. Fascinating.

(The site is run by Michael Quinion, whose book Port Out, Starboard Home I’ve mentioned before and would whole-heartedly recommend to anyone with an interest in the origin of words and phrases; not least because it devotes a lot of time to satisfyingly debunking the urban myths that grow up around words and phrases. This makes it feel a great deal more authoritative than other similar books which still trot out these myths as if they were fact.)