What are the origins of the phrase ‘bog standard’?
Does its use suggest any nuance perhaps not evident to Americans? That is, how does it differ from plain old ‘standard’?
I’ve no idea of its derivation, but it is used to mean something less than best possible - unambitious, unimaginative, uninspiring.
Per here:
and here:
the boring answer is: nobody really knows. Various ingenious etymologies have been proposed but the more ingenious the etymology, the less likely it is to be true.
“Bog” is a slang term for toilet, and as @PatrickLondon says, it does have the sense of being uninspiring, in teh way that a functional toilet is…you know, it’s fine. It does the job.
The other plausible derivation is a corruption of “box standard” as in, something that has no refinement or bespoke quality, just comes as standard out the box.
So in sum, we all know exactly what it means, we just don’t know, exactly, what it means.
I’ll be damned. I thought it had something to do with bogs – you know, areas of wet, marshy soil. Of which there’s no shortage across the British Isles.
Echoing the second cite: I read it and was struck by it in an article in ‘Car’ magazine in '66 or '67 (sorry, no cite).
They had an influx of Australian writers at the time, and I assumed it was Strine usage.
Not aware that this is particularly regional slang (e.g. British Isles or UK versus US, Australia,…), but what do I know. Moreover the dictionary says the origin is “uncertain” but suggests an alteration of “box-standard”; also quotes the April, 1962 issue of Motor Sport magazine, as you mention.
I’ve assumed its related to “bog” as slang for toilet.
It could have anti-Irish origins too unfortunately. “bog” is also an derogatory term for Irish (based on the idea that the Irish live in bogs)
The earliest Australian use I can see is 30 Sept 1969, a Tuesday and possibly late in the morning. As with other early uses its car-related.
As a term bog still has some currency in engineering and mechanics for something temporary and expedient, along the same lines of bodgy. Car body filler is known as bog, partly for its claggy shit texture and because of that sense of being not quite best practice.
My vote for origin would be through mechanic slang and ultimately from the same root word as bodgy, which seems to be British dialect for useless or crap [hence also Australian loutish youth called bodgies].
I can see how the term box standard can become corrupted. It would be typical for Brits to playfully usurp the term and going from x to s is slightly more annoying than going from g to s. It gets this Brit’s vote for most likely, on nothing more than gut instinct. The real answer is hidden but none of the other suggested alternatives seem very likely.
You are thinking of the word dodgy. I’ve never heard bodgy used ever. Though you might bodge something together, which is to improvise.
I’ve heard another etymology (not suggesting it’s any more likely than the other offerings). For precision engineering the best materials were required, and engineers would specify “British or German Standard”. In notes this was abbreviated to “BOG standard”. Over time, the meaning of the expression changed (as often happens ) and bog standard came to mean something like run-of-the-mill.
If you google “British or German Standard” (use quotes) you’ll see this (and variants of it) crop up - most comments are pretty dismissive. Here’s a supportive note (from a Guardian reader):
Between the world wars, the only precision engineering facilities in Europe were in Britain and Germany. Instruments were were calibrated to ‘BoG’ (British or German) Standard.
Alex Watson, Nürtingen Germany
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-203827,00.html
j
Yeah, without researching it, that really smells heavily of false backronym type etymologies.
Any etymology relying on abbreviations is automatically suspect. Any from before WWII is almost certainly not true.
There is a common story that bog here is really an acronym from “British or German”, on the grounds that standards in manufacturing were set in Victorian times by British and German engineering. That’s hardly likely, but it’s an interesting example of the tendency among amateur word sleuths to explain any puzzling word as an acronym.
I’m automatically suspicious of any acronym based etymology that predates world war two. But I guess in manufacturing acronyms were commonly used before WW2?
From my recollection bog-standard applied primarily to cars/motors/engineering.
I think the box-standard origin might be on the money.
If I was driving a bog-standard vehicle it was unmodified, “just out of the box”, as it came off the assembly line, without any customisation, personalisation or enhancements. Anyone could get a near identical machine and it had base level performance. Reliable but not spectacular.
If you could do something in a bog standard vehicle then anyone could be expected to do it.
If you could do something in a bog standard vehicle that others couldn’t then that was a reflection on the capabilities of the driver.
@pulykamell @Exapno_Mapcase @griffin1977
Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of you guys. I’m just offering up something else I came across as another piece of information.
j
Acronyms not abbreviations. There are plenty of examples of abbreviations that predate the 20th century. Its things like “Port side Out Starboard Home” and “Fornication Under Consent of the King” that are dubious. Forming words phonetically from acronyms was only commonplace after/during WW2 “Jeep”, “Duck/DUKW” etc.
But that said in the manufacturing industry I think it predates ww2 even if it didn’t become common parlance.
Re the above discussion, I wondered if I had got “British or German Standard” from Partridge; I hadn’t – he gives a quite different etymology
Standard, straight from the factory, with no refinement or modification. Orig applied mainly to motorcycles, since mid 1950s….Prob ex Bog-wheel
Elsewhere he gives “Bog-wheel” as Cambridge undergraduate slang (of the era) for a bicycle,
It’s wheels are - like the gap in a water closet seat - round.
and
Hence, a motorcycle; Army, WW2
j
ETA: Eric Partridge, slang etymologist
Sorry, but every word origin thread here for the last twenty years has screamed about acronyms being offered as real information. Way past time to stop.
Ack. Senior moment.
There are certainly abbreviations, but virtually no acronyms.
There are names that fall somewhere in between simple abbreviations and acronyms. Some date from the 19th century or earlier.
What I’m refering to is names that are composed of the first letter of a number of other names. For example, the town of Germfask MI gets its name from the last name initials of the 8 men who founded the town. The earliest such name I could find is that of LeMars IA, which got its name in 1870 from the first names of 8 ladies on a rail excursion to the then new town. (There were two each whose names started with L and M; those got their letter capitalized rather than duplicated.)
There were also a number of towns named after companies, usually in the form of the abbreviation/acronym of the company. Alcoa TN is perhaps the largest of these. Almost all of them were company towns. The earliest (1878) I could find is Elco IL, which was not a company town, but rather the letters stenciled on crates outside the general store ( E. Levenworth and COmpany General Store). The next earliest was 1892 or thereabouts, but I forget its name.
However, in both cases I couldn’t date all the examples I found, so there could be some earlier. I compiled all these names in this Wikipage: List of geographic acronyms and initialisms, in case anyone wants to see them all.
Two things.
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“Virtually no” does not mean “none” but “a small number.”
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Acronyms that make it into the common language tend to have different routes than acronyms that refer to shortenings or collectives.
Business names like ELCO are related to portmanteau words. The gerrymander, putting Elbridge Gerry and salamander together, preceded it by several decades. Portmanteaus move into the language; business terms tend to stick to the business. We don’t IBM anything. We Xerox things from a made-up word, but don’t minolta ( “Mechanism, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima”) them. We don’t alcoa or zimco things, either, even though they made it to town names. Nor do we jetson ( J. E. Taylor and SON, co-owners of a local business) things, although after the cartoon you’d think we would.
Cabal is an interesting extremely early case. The word cabal was already used to mean “intrigue by a small group,” but the coincidence that a group of Charles II’s ministers, named Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale, worked on a secret treaty popularized the use of cabal and has been given as the folk etymology for the word for hundreds of years.
These examples are collectively rare in common language, outside of place names. Historically, it’s quite accurate to say that despite a small spate of acronyming accompanying wars, the practice first boomed with WWII and never stopped.