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Bog Standard (2005)


Professor David Crystal gives short talks on the origins and usage of new and evolved words and phrases.

It's a British slang thing; its origin is quite obscure; nobody quite knows where it came from. 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.

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Bog Standard