Searching for the Real McCoy

by samclem

In the world of linguists, it’s been assumed for the last 30 or 40 years that the American phrase The Real McCoy, meaning “the genuine article,” was somehow related to the Scottish phrase The Real Mackay, an advertising slogan for Scotch whiskey from the MacKay family of distillers going back to the mid 19th century.

The earliest use of the phrase in print was by Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous Scotch drinker, er uh, writer. Stevenson wrote “he’s the real Mackay” in 1883, and used a similar construction a few years later.

The American version, using McCoy, appears somewhat later. Some idiom-sleuths attributed it to a famous American boxer, “Kid” McCoy, and others to an African-American inventor, Elijah McCoy. These were the two main theories for much of the 20th century. In either case, no one could find examples dated before 1900.

Enter the modern school of dedicated antedaters, armed with searchable, digitized databases. One can search newspapers and books in minutes, when previous scholars spent months and years doing it the old fashioned way. Fred Shapiro, one of the leading antedaters today, is associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at Yale Law School. Professor Shapiro has recently found a Canadian newspaper cite for Real McCoy as far back as 1891.

Here’s where we blend fact and conjecture. The Scots pronunciation of MacKay, to my American ear, is Mac-KYE. How much of a stretch is it to assume that hearers of the phrase on the North American continent, both in the U.S. and Canada, might change the spelling to conform to what they heard? MacKay (MacKye) becomes McCoy. It’ll have to do until we invent a time machine.