"Plonques" : new etymythonym?

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:44 AM -0700 9/30/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Disputing the prevailing derivation from _vin blanc_, "Ian Maclure"
>told the Newsgroup soc.history.war.misc on Jan. 7, 2000,
>
>"Nope, 'Plonques' was a firm of French wine merchants noted for a
>particularly vile type of Algerian Red they supplied to the French
>Army. Hence it has passed into English as a synonym for rancid
>tipple."  [
>http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.war.misc/browse_frm/thread/4c46d8bbd3a82891/4ff011921b3c4ab9?lnk=st&q=plonques&rnum=4&hl=en#4ff011921b3c4ab9
>]
>
>This assertion appears at a few websites as well, including the
>ambitious "Miltary Slang For WWII and There Meanings"
>[http://www.freewebs.com/erdevision/slang.htm ].
>I find no authoritative online references to the firm of Plonques
>nor, curiously, do I expect to find any elsewhere.
>
>
I was wondering whether the predominance of references to red wine
casts any doubt on the "vin blanc" assumption, but this is taken into
account by e.g. the OED entry:

PLONK
[prob. a corruption of blanc in Fr. vin blanc.]

     Cheap wine, or wine of poor quality. Also attrib.

Various popular and humorous etymologies, such as that suggested in
quot. 1967 ["Surely the word 'plonk' is onomatopoeic, being the noise
made when a cork is withdrawn from the bottle?"], are without
foundation. Although it may be argued that the word denotes red wine
more commonly than it does white wine, the etymology given above is
attested by the earliest sources.

The first non-bracketed cite is:
1930 H. WILLIAMSON Patriot's Progress IV. 137 Nosey and Nobby shared
a bottle of plinketty plonk, as vin blanc was called.


--None of the "popular and humorous etym[yth]ologies" attested in the
OED cites mentions Plonques et cie, but it was just a matter of time.

Larry