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The general tone of the word cushy these days seems to be moving from comfort to luxury.

Where a cushy job means a “comfortable job” the examples I see in my newspaper web-searching talk of cushy hotels and such. This seems to me to have a tone of something more than “comfort.”

The word cushy hasn’t been with us for all that long.  The Oxford English Dictionary first citation is from 1915.

Most of the etymological resources I looked at said that the word came via Anglo-Indian from Hindi and perhaps even from Persian.  The source word being khush meaning “pleasant” or “beautiful.”

I said most of the etymological sources.

One holdout is the American Heritage Dictionary that acknowledges this Ango-Indian theory but then pours cold water on it.

According to American Heritage that first citation for cushy appears in the writings of a young soldier fighting in France during the First World War.  They point out that no direct Indian connection has been found with cushy and so they speculate that instead of coming from a Hindi word for “pleasant,” cushy may simply be a modification of cushion, or possibly a French word coucheé which they translate as “lying down, a bed.”

I’d have translated it as “sleeping.”

The point here is that even thought the most authoritative dictionaries in the world—and here I’d say the OED and Merriam-Webster represent the pan-oceanic superpowers—even though they claim an etymology, the fact is that oftentimes it’s just a theory.

But in the case of the American Heritage Dictionary their theory is just a theory too.

It is true that the word first shows up from the pen of an Englishman in Europe.  But that Englishman was fighting in the British army which had just spent 50 years policing colonial India.

Other early citations for the word cushy also seem to have emerged during the First World War.

One of these was the phrase a cushy wound.  A cushy wound was one that didn’t actually endanger your life but was enough to get you out of the trenches.

Though the American Heritage Dictionary can’t find an Anglo-Indian connection, there seems to me to be a military connection and the British military were steeped in Indian sourced words.

That first citation has a bit of a poignant story behind it.  It comes from a book that was privately printed in only 150 copies.  These were the letters of Denis Oliver Barnett; Dobbin to his friends.

He wrote of some of the cushy billets he had during training and as an officer but unfortunately for him when he eventually got wounded it wasn’t a cushy wound.  He died in just a few hours.

He was 20 at the time.