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Bog standard
Ron Draney
721 Posts
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1
2015/02/11 - 11:51am

This week, Martha spoke of a Financial Times article introducing her to the British phrase bog standard, meaning "ordinary or undistinguished from others of its type". The derivation was correctly given as coming from the UK term "bog" for "toilet", and the folk etymology "box standard" was mentioned and dismissed.

It might also help to support the true interpretation if we remember another Briticism, common as muck. That also compares the ordinary to the substance found beneath the outhouse; there's always more of it than anyone could need, not very valuable, etc, and it combines the two meanings of "common", both "standard" and "of low quality". The Brits make fun of us for using "vanilla" this way, and I wonder if part of the reason is that to them it seems to equate food with the after-product of eating.

Another UK term for "ordinary" is common or garden. You'll hear them speak of "common or garden television programmes", to distinguish them from the special, highly-prized sort. The influence here is clearly from nature books, which so often referred to things like snails or daisies by the two alternative adjectives one after the other that "common or garden" has become a fixed phrase for things not commonly found in gardens at all.

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2015/02/11 - 1:36pm

Your comment makes me think of garden-variety, a phrase I have known my whole life in the figurative sense for ordinary or run-of-the-mill. I don't think garden-variety is particular to the UK. And my lifetime is gauge enough that it has been around in the US for quite some time, although it is hard to pinpoint when the figurative sense crept in, since most early ngrams appear to be literal.

[edit: added the following]

I found one figurative use in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, Volume 58, United States Naval Institute, 1932
1932 example

... as long as there was a Navy there would be plenty of use for the ordinary common garden variety of naval officer. But what sort of naval officer did the senior mean? He could hardly have been using the term "garden variety" in contradistinction to specialists. ...

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2015/02/11 - 2:51pm

'Vanilla' must be from that flavor of ice cream,  how popular and therefore ubiquitous and common it is.  'Vanilla' means plain, simple, but not low quality.  In the world of computer products, it means the basic set of features before the add-ons, the bells-and-whistles.

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