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

[Mike Jing]

Fascinating. This also raises another interesting question: what does the
word "gallantry" mean here? Does it mean "bravery" or "courtliness to the
ladies?" Is he trying to butter her up, or making a joking accusation?


On Sat, Jul 9, 2022 at 12:10 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
> --
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