Why bog standard

But why 'bog standard'? It may result from the association with the word 'bog', which has long been used in the UK to mean toilet. Indeed, that meaning is used in one of the more ingenious derivations that correspondents have suggested - that it was coined in the BBC as a derogatory description of the production values of their rival ATV, an organisation run by Lew Grade. A neat construction, but most likely a back-formation and, hearsay apart, there's no evidence to support it.

The other most often repeated theory of the derivation is that it is a mispronunciation of 'box standard', the term referring to unmodified goods coming straight from the box. This appears to be a later expression, first recorded in , but is likely to have been around in everyday speech for some years prior to that. If one phrase did influence the other, it is more likely that 'box-standard' is a mispronounced or euphemistic version of 'bog standard'. My last car was just a bog-standard model.

Standard and routine. You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics: Quite good, or not very good. What is the pronunciation of bog-standard? Browse boffin. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes.

Image credits. Word of the Day have a heart of gold. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I "had recourse to" OED to paraphrase Boswell about philosophy , and soon learned that the term was considered a recent and b of "uncertain origin". OED also confirmed my surmise about the meaning, although not my association of the term with 'down-to-earth'.

The first attestation given was from an ad in the April, issue of Motor Sport :. The OED story about the term was similar to the story at The Phrase Finder , a source of "unequal reliability", and other sources summoned by invoking internet search engine demons DuckDuckGo repeated much the same story.

None of the sources, by the way, corroborated my association of the term with 'down-to-earth'. The existing stories are summed up in the OED entry, which is new as of the 3rd Edition, March Etymology: Origin uncertain; perhaps an alteration of box standard n.

Differing theories of the origin of bog-standard have been proposed, but none proven. An immediate association with bog n. The most commonly held view is that the transition from box to bog resulted from a mishearing or misunderstanding of box standard n.

Can anybody who reads this and is willing, etc. In your quote from OED, it says that the use of box-standard in the meaning of "ordinary" first appeared in , thus making this theory not as possible. I have also found that quote, just for fun. This quote was said by the inventor Sir Cline Sinclair in an interview with magazine Computerworld , February Luckily, we cannot foresee the day when a computer becomes just a standard box.

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