REAL MCCOY, THE

[Q] From Ana Elisa Leiderman: Could you please tell me how the expression the real McCoy originated?

[A] There are at least half a dozen theories that argue that one of the myriad McCoys of America at the end of the nineteenth century is the genuinely real McCoy that led to this common expression, meaning the real thing. Its origin is unclear, which has opened the gates to admit an astonishing range of individuals bearing ideas, most of them owing much to ingenuity but little to hard fact. Was it perhaps:

• Elijah McCoy, who invented a machine to lubricate the moving parts of a railway locomotive?
• The famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud that enlivened the West Virginia-Kentucky border in the 1880s?
• As Alistair Cooke once argued, a famous cattle baron of that name?

• A Prohibition-era rum-runner named Bill McCoy?
• The real Macao, pure heroin imported from the Far East?
• From the name of the American boxer Norman Selby, known as Kid McCoy, who was welterweight champion from 1898-1900?

This one, McCoy's Saddlery at
Porlock in Somerset, isn't
a serious candidate!

There is broad agreement among a lot of writers that this last one is the true origin. It is said that McCoy had so many imitators who took his name in boxing booths in small towns throughout the country that eventually he had to bill himself as Kid “The Real” McCoy, and the phrase stuck. There’s another anecdote in which a sceptical drunk who met the boxer in a bar denied he was the real article with such force that McCoy was forced to hit him. After recovering the drunk said, “It’s the real McCoy!” These stories, I have to tell you, are entirely apocryphal and there’s no evidence whatsoever for the imitators or the drunk.

There’s plenty of evidence, however, for suggesting that the original McCoy was actually a Mackay. The earliest example is from 1856, recorded in the Scottish National Dictionary: “A drappie [drop] o’ the real MacKay”. The same work says that in 1870 the slogan was adopted by Messrs G Mackay and Co, whisky distillers of Edinburgh. That would most likely explain the first instance of the expression in the Oxford English Dictionary, which records a letter written by the author Robert Louis Stevenson in 1883: “He’s the real Mackay”. Certainly early references are to a drop of the hard stuff.

And some other examples also point towards this Scottish origin. A Rock in the Baltic, by Robert Barr, dated 1906, has: “I shouldn’t have taken the liberty of introducing him to you as Prince Lermontoff if he were not, as we say in Scotland, a real Mackay — the genuine article”. And from Australia, Andrew “Banjo” Paterson wrote in An Outback Marriage, also published in 1906: “‘We brought a drop o’ rum,’ replied Charlie. ‘Ha! That’ll do. That’s the real Mackay,’ said the veteran, slouching along at a perceptibly quicker gait”.

It looks very much — without being able to say for sure — as though the term was originally the real Mackay, but became converted to the real McCoy in the US, either under the influence of Kid McCoy, or for some other reason.

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