GR translation: the one with the graft at the Ministry of Supply

[Michael Bailey]

https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-har3.htm


Other possible meanings exist for “graft” besides “corrupt dealing”


American usage is largely confined to “corruption,” but English usage
varies. In this passage from a British episode of GR, the context suggests
“a job at the Ministry” rather than “actively committing fraud at the
Ministry”


2 supporting links, each with long copy-paste:


https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2012/01/graft.html?m=1


graft
JL in New York wrote recently with this observation:

Last week's Economist included an article ("Executive Pay: Money for
Nothing?", in the Britain section) that begins:

Hard work builds character, and should be rewarded. But many Britons
believe the link between graft and gain has broken down.


The word that struck me was "graft" -- in my AmE usage, it can only mean
"corruption", not "hard work".  (Other than horticulturally.)

The link between graft (AmE) and gain has, sadly, not broken down, of
course.



My first thought was that certainly AmE has the 'hard work' sense of *graft*,
since the phrase *hard graft *is known there. But is it the case that AmE
and BrE are divided by *graft*?

The corruption sense of *graft *is listed in the OED as '*colloq. *(orig.
U.S.)'. Their first published citation for it is from an 1865 New
York-based police gazette. *West's Encyclopedia of American Law
<http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/graft> *defines it as:

*A colloquial term referring to the unlawful acquisition of public money
through questionable and improper transactions with public officials.*
Graft is the personal gain or advantage earned by an individual at the
expense of others as a result of the exploitation of the singular status
of, or an influential relationship with, another who has a position of
public trust or confidence. The advantage or gain is accrued without any
exchange of legitimate compensatory services.
Behavior that leads to graft includes Bribery
<http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Bribery> and dishonest
dealings in the performance of public or official acts. Graft usually
implies the existence of theft, corruption, Fraud
<http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Fraud>, and the lack of
integrity that is expected in any transaction involving a public official.

This sense of *graft *may or may not come from the 'work' sense of *graft*;
the OED lists them separately and doesn't have an etymology it trusts for
the 'work' sense either. The 'work' sense is also listed as *'slang'*and
the first citation is in the phrase *hard graft* in 1853. An 1890 *Glossary
of Words of County Glouster*lists it as meaning 'work', so perhaps it has
dialectal origins there. Neither of these senses of the word, then, seems
to be terribly old, but because they're colloquial and dialectal, they'll
have unwritten histories going back further.

So, how well-known are the senses in AmE and BrE? A quick look at our
(chiefly AmE) *go-to* corpora
<http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/independent/kursmaterialien/language_computers/whatis.htm>,
the Corpus of Contemporary American English <http://corpus.byu.edu/coca> and
the British National Corpus (via Mark Davies' interface
<http://corpus.byu.edu/>) can give some indication.  First I looked at how
much of the use of the noun *graft* in either corpus consisted of the
phrase *hard graft*. For AmE it was only 6 of 640 (less than 1%), for BrE
28/145 (19%).

Taking a sample of 100 sentences containing a noun *graft* from each
corpus, the use of particular senses breaks down as:
Sense BNC (BrE) COCA (AmE)
work 33 2
corruption 14 29
tissue 42 62
spade/shovel 7 0
proper name 0 6
?? 4 3

So, the first thing to notice is that the 'work' meaning is indeed much
more common in BrE. Both cases in the AmE sample were *hard graft*. Most of
the 'work' uses in BrE were also modified by an adjective, but in addition
to *hard*, there was *honest,* *sheer*, *real*, *tireless* etc.

Second thing to notice: the 'corruption' sense is hardly unknown in
BrE--but about half as frequent as in AmE. In both corpora, tissue grafts
(on trees, skin, veins, bones, etc.) are the most common kind of graft.

Third, the 'spade/shovel' sense is particular to BrE. The OED defines it as
'a narrow crescent-shaped spade used by drainers', and its only citation is
from a 1893 Worcestershire dialect glossary. One of the corpus examples
mentioned it as a Norfolk term--these are not particularly close to each
other, but who knows what was really happening dialectally 100 years ago or
what changed in the 100 years till the BNC. (I mention *shovel* because of
the American tendency to use the term instead of *spade*, discussed back
here
<http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/08/seaside-diversions.html>
.)

And then there are more people or at least more famous people named *Graft* in
the US than the UK (probably the former, it's a German name
<http://www.houseofnames.com/Graft-history?A=54323-292>).

The ?? cases were those that I couldn't really tell the meaning of in the
little bit of text I was given (e.g. in the BNC: *His father quarrelled
with the Colonels over some detail of graft*). I didn't go to the effort of
looking at the larger contexts, which might have helped. But what this 3-4%
of ambiguous cases tells us is that even though *graft* has lots of
meanings, they don't cause too much difficulty in understanding the
language. The people who originally heard/read those seven ambiguous cases
in full context probably had no problem with it at all.

So, my initial reaction 'Americans know about 'work' *graft*' might only
(or particularly) be true of Americans like me who hang around a lot of
British people and are able to separate the word from the phrase *hard
graft*. And it just goes to show, you shouldn't trust your memories of
words and meanings you've "always" known, as those kinds of memories just
aren't very good. Can anyone tell me: is there a name for that kind of
false memory/familiarity? It's the opposite of the Recency Illusion
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_illusion>, but I've not found a
particular name for the 'I've always said it that way' illusion.

Hard graft

Q From Raymond Hogg, Edinburgh: I was wondering if anyone knew where the
term hard graft came from, as in the British sense of hard work. I believe
in the US the term has a different, pejorative, meaning.

A There are several senses of graft in the language, such as the gardening,
medical and the bribery and corruption one from the US that you mention,
all from different sources.

Yours started life as another word for spit, the depth of earth that can be
thrown up at one time with a spade. This comes from the Old Norse groftr,
digging, and is also linked with the verb grave, an ancient Germanic one
also meaning to dig (from which we get the noun grave in the body-burial
sense).

Most commonly, graft turned up in the phrase spade’s graft for one spit’s
depth, as in this from the Transactions of the Society of Arts in 1792: “We
dug one spade’s graft (about nine inches deep, and seven inches wide) into
the quick sand.” Graft was also used for a trench or ditch, something that
had been grafted, and for a narrow, crescent-shaped spade workmen cut
drains with. The West Somerset Word-Book of 1888 noted that to graft was to
go much deeper than to spit; a glossary of 1891 of North Devon speech
recorded that to graft was “to push the tool down to its full depth each
time the soil is lifted”.

The implication is that grafting is hard work. The English Dialect
Dictionary noted, however, that in some counties, graft had taken on a
broader sense of work of any kind, but not particularly hard work.

The evidence strongly suggests that it was in Australia and New Zealand
that it came to mean heavy labour and where the phrase hard graft first
appeared. John Rochfort, writing in 1853 in Adventures of a Surveyor in New
Zealand, said, “I could make more money by ‘hard graft’, as they call
labour in the colonies.” An Australian work of 1873, Christmas on Carringa,
includes, “My name is Jim the Cadger. I’m a downy cove, you see. ‘Hard
graft’, it ain’t my fancy.”

It appears in the United States at the end of the century, where — for
example — the Fresno Weekly Republicanuses it on 10 August 1899: “Two years
of strict military discipline, hard ‘graft’ and sobriety will make a man
out of him, if anything will.” But it never seems to have caught on in that
country.