The real thing - not a substitute.
The Scottish racing cyclist Sir
Chris Hoy won the sixth
Olympic gold medal of his career at the London Games on 7th
August 2012, making
him the most successful British Olympian and elevating him
even higher in the
sporting firmament in the UK than he was before. This is far
from the first time
that Hoy has made news here and the red-top newspapers
strained themselves to
come up with new headlines - 'Medals Ahoy', 'Hoy Joy', 'Six
Machine', 'The Hoy
Wonder', 'Knight Rider', and so on. They couldn't do better
than the line on the
banner that his proud parents unfurl each time he wins - 'The
Real McHoy'. This
is of course a paraphrase of the expression 'the real McCoy'
(or 'real mackay',
'real macoy', 'real mackoy'...), which rivals 'the whole nine
yards' and 'the
full Monty' for pre-eminence in the 'I know where that phrase
comes from'
stakes. As usual, plausibility and frequent retelling are
considered enough for
absolute certainty. With that in mind, please read on...
There are several sources that are suggested as being the origin of 'the real McCoy', for example:
The list goes on to include several other versions but none is supported by any evidence and they carry little credibility. Given that there's no hard evidence, the favourite has to be the earliest example to be found in print. That's a close call, as many of the sources date back to the second half of the 19th century. The earliest known printed citation is from 1856, in the Scottish poem Deil's Hallowe'en:
"A drappie o' [drop of] the real McKay."
This clearly refers to the McKay (or MacKay) whisky. The 'real MacKay' expression occurs in Scottish newspapers quite frequently in the 1860s and must have been in common use in Scotland at that date. There's no proof (no pun intended) that MacKay's whisky is the source of this phrase but we can say for sure that Elijah McCoy, Kid McCoy and the Hatfields and McCoys weren't involved in its coinage as their respective supposed involvements all come years after the expression was already widely used in print.
The 'Real McCoy' variant, which is essentially the same phrase, comes later and the earliest examples that I have found come from Canada. James S. Bond's novel The Rise and Fall of the Union Club, 1881, contains this:
By jingo! yes; so it will be. It's the 'real McCoy,' as Jim Hicks says. Nobody but a devil can find us there.
A December 1891 edition of the Canadian
newspaper The
Winnipeg Free
Press also
includes the
expression. Given that Elijah McCoy and the phrase 'the real
MacKay' both moved
from Scotland to Canada, it is possible that the adaption from
'real MacKay' to
'real McCoy' was done by him or on his behalf, but the real
'real MacKay', like
the 'real McHoy', is Scottish.
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