The Real McCoy

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For other uses, see The Real McCoy (disambiguation).

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"The real McCoy" is an idiom used throughout much of the English-speaking world to mean "the real thing" or "the genuine article" e.g. "he's the real McCoy". Its origins, though generally thought to be nineteenth or early twentieth century, are somewhat obscure.

In non English-speaking parts of the world, this idiom is frequently spelled "The real MacCoy".

[edit] Origins

Michael Quinion of the World Wide Words website summarises the half dozen or so theories on the origin of this phrase:

A boxer, Norman Selby, known as Kid McCoy, American welterweight champion from 1898-1900. There are apocryphal tales to the effect that he had many imitators and had to adopt the term to distinguish himself.
"The Real MacKay," a phrase that was said to appear first in 1856 as "A drappie [drop] o’ the real MacKay," by the Scottish National Dictionary; the same work says that the phrase was later adopted as a slogan to promote G Mackay & Co Ltd's whisky. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Robert Louis Stevenson from 1883 in a letter saying "He's the real Mackay."
The McCoy family of an infamous family feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys on the West Virginia-Kentucky border in the United States in the late nineteenth century.
A famous American cattle baron by the name of Joseph McCoy (Alistair Cooke's theory).
During the U.S. Prohibition era, it was common for rum-runner captains to add water to bottles to stretch their profits, or to re-label it as better goods. One American rum-runner captain and boat builder, William S. McCoy, became famous for never watering his booze, and selling only real top-quality products. Because of this, some accounts place McCoy as the source of the term "the Real McCoy."
A reference to pure heroin imported from Macau.
Elijah McCoy (1844-1929), Black Canadian inventor of a lubrication system for steam engines. Supposedly, after failed attempts by competitors to make counterfeits of his lubricant, the phrase "real McCoy" was used to refer to his authentic product.

Quinion notes that many authorities favor the Kid McCoy story, but he personally finds the MacKay story more convincing because of the concrete evidence which generally predates the references supporting other stories.

Other theories include:

McCoy pottery was made by the McCoy family in Ohio, United States, through most of the 20th century. Considered to be high quality and collectible, genuine McCoy pottery has naturally become prey to counterfeiting, both deliberately made or just similar designs later passed off as "the Real McCoy." [1]