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Bog standard
Professor David Crystal
It's pretty rare in English to find a compound word with a slang
first part and a formal second part. Bog standard is one of those
that's come in in the last few years. It means…what does it
mean? It means to be basic, to be ordinary, to be unexceptional,
to be uninspired – it just means ordinary. If you say something is
'bog standard', you mean it is perfectly ordinary. "He's got a bog
standard car" means a perfectly ordinary car. "I've got a bog
standard library book" means I've got a perfectly ordinary library
book that's not exceptional or interesting in any way.
It's a British slang thing; its origin is quite obscure; nobody quite
knows where it came from. Some people think that it's actually
from early motorbike sales, because motorbikes used to come in
a very large box you know when they were delivered – you
didn't sort of drive them away, they were delivered. They came
in what's called 'box standard' – and then that became 'bog
standard'; in other words, out of the box, it's a perfectly ordinary
kind of delivery, or ordinary kind of a bike that you bought.
But people don't like that and they think that it's got a much more interesting
etymology than that: a bog of course is a slang word for toilet in British English,
and some people think that 'bog standard' has that kind of origin. Don't see it
myself, somehow. I rather like the idea that bog means something rural, you know
– the rural people are often in the bog, 'cause the bog's a muddy sort of area, full
of peat and things like that. And so bog is often used to mean 'unsophisticated'.
So I don't know: there's three possible etymologies for it; nobody quite knows
where it comes from. It may have an ordinary meaning, but it certainly isn't an
ordinary word.
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