The Derivation of Blue Plate Special

Michael Quinion, writer, cidermaker, entrepreneur, (take your pick) is also a contributor of citations for the Oxford English Dictionary.

And on this page, he fields questions from readers on the derivations of too many words and phrases to even count.

Blue Plate Special. Where did that term come from?

The first example in the big Oxford English Dictionary is from a book by Sinclair Lewis dated 1945, but it is also the title of a story by Damon Runyon published in 1934. We have recently learned, because the digital complete text of the New York Times has become available, that it’s recorded in that newspaper as far back as 1926, and is probably older still.

A good description of the way the term was used is in an issue of the periodical The Restaurant Man for January 1929 under the title Quick Lunchplaces Have Own Vernacular. In an attached glossary, the writer wrote that: “A ‘blue plate’ is the label given a special daily combination of meat or fish, potatoes and vegetables, sold at a special price, and is ordered with the words, ‘blue plate’ ”. (My thanks to Barry Popik for finding this.)

So far so good, but finding out where the phrase comes from is rather more difficult. Though blue ribbon or blue riband, as a badge of honour that implies distinction and excellence, dates from early in the nineteenth century, it’s very doubtful whether it had any link to inexpensive restaurant meals, however good their value. The idea that it comes from a real blue plate on which the meal was served seems to be the right one. The Random House Webster’s Dictionary says of blue plate: “a plate, often decorated with a blue willow pattern, divided by ridges into sections for holding apart several kinds of food”. The Dictionary implies that the inexpensive meals were served on such plates.

Daniel Rogov, in the online Culinary Corner, recently provided an answer that may clear the whole thing up, though I’ve not been able to confirm what he says. He claims the first use of blue-plate special was on a menu of the Fred Harvey restaurants on 22 October 1892. These restaurants were built at stations to serve the travelling public on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad and it seems the blue-plate set meal was designed to rapidly serve passengers whose trains stopped only for a few minutes. He went on to say, “As to why the term ‘blue plate’—no mystery here. Fred Harvey bought nearly all his serving plates from a company in Illinois. Modelling their inexpensive but sturdy plates after those made famous by Josiah Wedgwood … these were, of course, blue in color. Thus, quite literally, the ‘blue plate’ special”.

I could read shit like that ALL DAY.

Boycott. How ’bout that one? The question is asked: I searched for the word boycott on your site but could not find anything. A television program recently said, I believe, that it was about the Revolutionary War and the boycott of British taxes.

Quinion’s reply:

Wrong period and wrong country, I’m afraid. No one who organised a boycott at that time could have used the word, because it only appeared in the language in 1880. It’s an excellent example of an eponym, a word based on a proper name, like wellington boots, garibaldi biscuits or the mackintosh.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an Englishman working in Ireland. In the 1870s he was farming at Loughmask in County Mayo and serving as a land agent for an absentee English landlord, Lord Earne. This was the time of the campaign organised by the Irish Land League for reform of the system of landholdings. In September 1880, protesting tenants demanded that Captain Boycott give them a substantial reduction in their rents. He refused. Charles Stuart Parnell, the President of the Land League, suggested in a speech that the way to force Boycott to give way was for everyone in the locality to refuse to have any dealings with him. Labourers would not work for him, local shops stopped serving him (food had to be brought in from elsewhere for him and his family), and he even had great trouble getting his letters delivered. In the end, his crops were harvested that autumn through the help of fifty volunteers from the north of the country, who worked under the protection of nine hundred soldiers.

The events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant byword. It was first used—in our modern sense of collective and organised ostracism—in the Times of London in November 1880, even while his crops were still being belatedly harvested; within weeks it was everywhere. It was soon adopted by newspapers throughout Europe, with versions of his name appearing in French, German, Dutch and Russian. By the time of the Captain’s death in 1897, it had become a standard part of the English language.

More answers:

Crocodile tears

Through the grapevine

Peanut gallery

I may never return from reading this site.