phoney / phony

I got in trouble for counterfeiting money, once.
I wasn’t being devious or anything; I’d just never gotten to play with a scanner, before.

In the ninth grade, I used the school's new printer to print a few black-and-white paper copies of a ten-dollar bill I had in my pocket. I couldn’t figure out how to print reverse images, so I had to cut the two sides of each bill out separately and stick them together with Elmer’s school glue.

--not exactly a criminal mastermind.

Anyway, I handed about five of them out to a few friends. “Look how cool I am, guys!”

They didn’t think I was very cool, but one of them took his home before he threw it away.

When his mother was doing some cleaning, she found the wadded bill in their kitchen garbage can and probably thought to herself “gee, why would someone throw away perfectly good black-and-white money?”

Believe it or not, she successfully spent it at Dollar General. It took a full day before the police came to my high school.

All the businesses in Dumas, Arkansas still mark ten-dollar bills with a marker before accepting them just in case I strike again.

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Of course, I'm not the first person to pull one over on The Man.

In Britain around the turn of the 19th century, swindlers would often run a scam called a “fawney rig”, in which a dishonest individual would drop a brass ring gilded with gold in a public place.

The swindler would then pretend to find the ring and sell it as a genuine gold ring to a hapless patsy. He or she would sell it for less than the value of a real gold ring but for substantially more than the ring was actually worth.¹

From fawney, we get phony, which The Oxford English Dictionary defines as:

• adjective. Fake, sham, counterfeit; false; insincere.

• noun. A fake or counterfeit thing; a false or insincere person.²

The word fawney in “fawney rig” actually refers to the ring itself, from Irish Gaelic fáinne, meaning simply “ring”.

Fáinne, furthermore, is derivative of Old Irish ánne, also meaning “ring”.³

What's interesting about this, however, is that ánne is most likely the root of English “anus”.⁴ I'll leave it to you to draw the connection between the two.

So the next time you want to call somebody an asshole, why not instead try anus's quainter doublet?

IMPORTANT EDIT//

So it looks like I was one of "those" people, y'all. I lied to you. English "anus" comes from Latin "anus".

--my bad!

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¹Grose, Francis. “fawney rig”. The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
² “phoney”. Oxford English Dictionary. 2007. Oxford University Press. 23 March 2009. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50177691.
³“phony”. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. 23 March 2009. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phony.
⁴“anus”. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. 23 March 2009. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anus.