Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 22 January 2005

A Lexicographer writes

issue 22 January 2005

I’ve just come back from the Army and Navy Stores, only it is not the Army and Navy Stores any more. They have changed the name, which was about the only thing that wasn’t wrong with it. It joins the Public Record Office, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Railtrack, although in the last case neither the thing nor the name was good.

Now that Christmas is distant and reduced, let me prepare you for next year. An intelligent publisher told me last week that the origin of the term Boxing Day was unknown. I told him I would look it up in the dictionary, which he thought was cheating. But I wish more people did so.

The OED is garrulous on the subject. Under Christmas-box it says, ‘A present or gratuity given in Great Britain, usually confined to gratuities to those who are supposed to have a vague claim on the donor for services rendered to him as one of the general public by whom they are employed and paid, or as a customer of their legal employer; the undefined theory being that as they have done offices for this person, for which he has not directly paid them, some direct acknowledgment is becoming at Christmas.’

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