Grooming is a horrible phenomenon of modern life when it happens to abused children. Yet a magazine such as GQ can announce the ‘Eight best grooming products in the world this week’. The GQ grooming is not of children, nor yet of horses, but of men at their own hands. Identical words can thrive in silos with quite different meanings.
A groom was originally a boy, it seems, though the word popped up from nowhere in the 13th century. Some think it related to the Old French gromet, which gave us the English grummet or gromet, ‘ship’s boy’. In French, in the form gourmet, it came to mean ‘wine-merchant’s assistant’, and was borrowed by English again in the 19th century to mean ‘connoisseur of eating’. Gourmet is unrelated to gourmand, ‘greedy-guts’, of unknown origin.
I think Gromit, who lives with Wallace, got that name because it sounded funny.
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