The dictionaries I’ve got easy access to don’t present a clear-cut difference. It’s suggested that attaché cases are, on average, thinner. But the terms have secondary definitions that point to each other and suggest a degree of overlap.
Is there a difference – according to manufacturers, or history, or someone – between the two kinds of cases, or are they somewhat fuzzy categories with a lot of overlap?
Well, I’m pulling this one out of my ass, but I believe that attaché cases are of the soft variety, where briefcases are of the hard variety.
Browsing around on Google…
Samsonite says they’re the same thing.
http://www.backpack-newzealand.com/luggage/Briefcases/samsonite.html
So do these folks.
http://www.granadagalleria.com/briefcas.htm
http://theannointedsgiftshopwholesale.bizhosting.com/luggage_and_organizers.html
http://www.newsearching.com/business_luggage/business_luggage.html
These folks, however, say an “attache” is a soft-sided oversized handbag sort of thing, with a shoulder strap, designed to hold a laptop plus paraphernalia.
http://www.bulgebag.com/attache.html
http://www.newsearching.com/business_luggage/Compact_@ttache_-_Black.html
So I’m seeing a consensus slowly building on Google that they’re basically the same thing, except for the occasional manufacturer who wants to make something quite different and call it an “attache”.
Starnge place to keep your attaché case?
Clearly the spelling is different.
25 years or so the difference was pretty clear, at least to me. An attache case was rectangular, hard sided and thin, sort of like a small suitcase. A briefcase was larger and shaped like an old-style handbag, with an opening at the top held closed by a strap. Most businesspeople were switching over to attache cases by then, but lawyers still used briefcases because they held bigger, bulkier files (like…briefs.)
Good question. Brief cases should contain documents tied up with pink ribbon, which means any luggage article carried or towed to work by my barrister wife is a brief case. I’m guessing therefore that the term “briefcase” has come to mean “like what barristers carry”.
I wonder if the two cases started out as distinctly different entities. Given time – and their use by people who they weren’t originally designed for – they could have become more and more similar, until there really isn’t a difference anymore.
I asked the Seattle Public Library’s reference librarians this question, and the best guess answer that came back indicated that attaché cases may have had locks, originally, while briefcases didn’t. But they didn’t come up with a clear-cut answer, either.