Friday words #247

By | December 4, 2020

Today’s new-to-me term is also new-new. Although it doesn’t come directly from the whole Covid business, it’s an indirect coinage from Covid-related measures.

The word is carside delivery, or more generically, carside service. It refers to (for now) food delivery, where you order via an app, then go wait in the parking lot of the restaurant. When your food is ready, they bring it to your car. It’s in the genre of contactless service, as you sometimes see advertised.

This term is used and probably invented by Domino’s, the pizza chain, and they have a trademark bug on the phrase carside delivery. But even if you search for the more generic carside service, the results are overwhelmingly about that company.[1] The term is new enough that the COCA corpus gets no hits. And when you search in Google, it gently suggests that you might mean something else:

Google search results showing "Did you mean 'curbside service'"

Google’s suggested alternative tells us where the term comes from: curbside service or just curb service, an existing phrase that means pretty much the same thing, i.e., delivery to a vehicle. Domino’s thus didn’t invent any new concept, but they’ve tweaked an existing phrase. I would argue that, trademarks and marketing aside, carside delivery is actually a more accurate and clearer phrase.

Origins! It’s American football season, and one of the unfortunate things we see often is a player sustaining an injury and limping off the field. Where does the word to limp come from?

Unsatisfyingly, this is another “origin obscure” word. There’s a word lemphealt in Old English that stuck around as the word lymphault into Middle English. The -hault part is related to the archaic halt, meaning to walk irregularly or to have this condition, as in “the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind” in the KJV Bible.

It’s the lemp/lymp part that’s sort of obscure. A theory is that lemp refers to something that droops, so walking in a drooping manner. But it’s not entirely clear, because there aren’t enough instances of these words in the old manuscripts to let etymologists know for sure. What is pretty sure is that the adjective and noun both derive from the verb.

Anyway, fingers crossed that we see few instances of limping for the rest of the season.

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[1] I wonder whether Domino’s considers that it has a trademark on just the word carside.[^]