Tag: Etymology

Grunge – History of Term

1: one that is grungy
2: rock music incorporating elements of punk rock and heavy metal
also : the untidy fashions typical of fans of grunge

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grunge

JONATHAN PONEMAN I read the expression grunge many, many times in music journalism before Everett True used it. Everett took the word from the Sub Pop mail-order catalog description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone that Bruce wrote: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”

MARK ARM The word grunge was tossed around a little bit here and there well before I ever used it. Steve Turner picked up this ’70s reissue of a Rock ’n’ Roll Trio album, and the liner notes talk about Paul Burlison’s “grungy guitar sound.” That was written in the ’70s about a ’50s guitar player.

Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.

JACK ENDINO None of us is entirely sure about who used the word first. I saw it in a Lester Bangs record review in Rolling Stone in the ’70s. Mark Arm had used the word in the early ’80s.

Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
Mark Yarm

From the introduction:

First, let’s get that word out of the way. Grunge. Yes, this is a book about grunge. The term that bedeviled and, let’s face it, benefited (at least temporarily) many a Seattle rock musician in the early to mid-1990s. I cannot count how many times, when I described to an interviewee what exactly it was I was working on, I’d get back, “I hate that word …” And here they would go one of two ways: spit out “that word” grunge or insist, “I don’t even like to say it,” as if uttering that one syllable would somehow validate a now decades-old coinage. (For a thorough, yet inconclusive, probe into how grunge got its name, see chapter 17.) Others reacted to the term thusly: “rubs me raw,” “a marketing tool,” “it’s all just music,” “fuckin’ concocted bullshit.” And this: “When I see the word grunge, especially on books, I kind of go”—and at this point, the guy I was interviewing made a rather convincing vomiting sound.

Dive Bars – Origin of Term, Simpsons Reference

Do bars like Moe’s from the Simpsons exist where guys just go to get away from home?
Reddit

your_fave_redditor
It’s a thing in The Simpsons because it is a thing irl.

perfectdrug659
My favorite dive bar had $10 pitchers and free pool and they would stay open as late as people wanted to stay, as long as you were quiet about that last bit.

Appsoul
Oh, perfect time to ask this question. Why do they call them dive bars?

reclusive_ent
The less legit, but cheaper, drinking spots were in basements cellars and back rooms. So you usually had to duck or “dive” to get into them.

SkiyeBlueFox
According to Wikipedia, its because in the late 1800s establishments of poor reputation were often in basements, so you would “dive” down into the joint

Connermets25
Yes they still exist. It used to be more common place. I worked at several big companies and most of them had a bar where workers would often frequent nearby. The younger generation isn’t like that much anymore.

Hip-Hop – Origin of Term

By the mid-1970s, neighborhood D.J.s started holding parties in parks and community centers. In July 1977 — the month of a blackout that left New York City dark — the brothers met a D.J. named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Grandmaster Flash.

Flash worked with a bowlegged teenager named Keef Cowboy, who energized the crowds with simple rhymes and exhortations. When a friend enlisted in the military, Cowboy teased him on the microphone: “Hip, hop, hip, hop!”

The new culture would soon have a name.

The Fall of Kidd Creole: Inside a Rap Pioneer’s Tragic Descent
As a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, he helped invent hip-hop. He spent the rest of his life trying to recapture that glory. Then, in seven minutes on a Manhattan street, it all came to an end.

Fossil Words

WTW for a word that is almost exclusively only used in a set phrase? For example, the word “figment” in the phrase “a figment of your imagination”.
byu/DracoOccisor inwhatstheword

Bayoris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word

DracoOccisor
Solved

aj-uk
I hope you feel gruntled.

Reapr
and whelmed

From wikipedia:

“Born fossils”
These words were formed from other languages, by elision, or by mincing of other fixed phrases.

caboodle, as in “kit and caboodle” (evolved from “kit and boodle”, itself a fixed phrase borrowed as a unit from Dutch kitte en boedel)
druthers, as in “if I had my druthers…” (formed by elision from “would rather”[11] and never occurring outside this phrase to begin with)
tarnation, as in “what in tarnation…?” (evolved in the context of fixed phrases formed by mincing of previously fixed phrases that include the term “damnation”)
nother, as in “a whole nother…” (fixed phrase formed by rebracketing another as a nother, then inserting whole for emphasis; almost never occurs outside this phrase)

Shoegaze – Why is it Called that?

My Bloody Valentine is most famous for elevating “shoegaze,” a dreamy style of guitar music named for the activity of manipulating the technology — literally, gazing at the pedals next to your shoes — required to conjure such a swirling sound. The band is also famous for disappearing: After releasing its second album, “Loveless,” in 1991, it was mostly inactive for nearly 20 years, as rumors of a follow-up swelled and dispersed. After reuniting to perform live, the band surprised everyone in 2013 with “m b v,” a new record that appeared online in the middle of the night with no advance notice, instantly crashing the band’s website as fans swarmed to download it.

NYTIMES

Commute

The word commuter derives from early days of rail travel in US cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, where, in the 1840s, the railways engendered suburbs from which travellers paying a reduced or ‘commuted’ fare into the city. Later, the back formations “commute” and “commuter” were coined therefrom. Commuted tickets would usually allow the traveller to repeat the same journey as often as they liked during the period of validity: normally, the longer the period the cheaper the cost per day.[2]


Wikipedia