franchise

[Dan Goncharoff]

I am a little confused.

Franchise is a word that refers to a legal concept, but also refers to
a broader "underlying concept'.

I see the word being used for both over the years, and I would call
the "underlying concept" a 'de facto' franchise.

That is what the 1936 cite is all about -- WB made a lot of G-Men
movies. Other studios could have made them; other studios in fact did.
But WB made a lot of them.

Here is a 1951 cite:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20715F83E5A137A93C3AB178AD85F458585F9&scp=15&sq=movie+franchise&st=p
"MAURICE EVANS, who will renew his local franchise on Shakespeare's
"King Richard II" when he brings the tragedy to the City Center
Wednesday night..."

This is the same meaning as the 1936 WB cite. Other actors can perform
Richard II, but Maurice Evans did it a lot.

I can't find the '88 cite -- is it a de facto franchise, or another concept?

Now here is a 1979 cite:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F10915F8345C12728DDDA00894D1405B898BF1D3
"It is a law of television that a dramatic-series hero must have a
franchise. That is, he or she must be a problem-solver of some sort --
police officer, private investigator, physician, lawyer, teacher,
coach."

Looks different to me. Means something akin to "gimmick".

DanG


On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> Subject:      Re: franchise
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 08:52:07AM -0500, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>> OED offers a good def. of the now-ubiquitous "franchise":  "orig. *U.S.* A
>> general title, format, or unifying concept used for creating or marketing a
>> series of products (esp. films, television shows, etc.)."
>>
>> Its primary ex. is from the _N.Y. Times_ in 1936.  However, there follows a
>> half-century gap and in 1988 the same NYT had to define the word for its
>> readers.
>>
>> 1936 says, "Warner Brothers hold their G-Man franchise with ‘Public Enemy's
>> Wife’ at the Strand."
>>
>> The uniquely early date, plus the tenor of "hold" (presumably "maintain")
>> suggests to finicky me that the writer was simply playing facetiously off
>> the established sense of an official authorization to trade in something,
>>
>> So I'd put the ex. in brackets - unless OED has a bunch of suppressed cites
>> showing continuity of usage between 1936 and 1986.
>
> We did puzzle over this, and no, we don't have any intervening cites (we
> would have included them, had any been available). Still, I don't think
> bracketing is the right solution here--the 1936 quote does represent the
> sense in question, and the fact that this sense didn't really catch on
> for fifty years doesn't really matter. The quotation paragraph shows
> that there's a gap, and that seems good enough to me; other
> possibilities might be to have an explicit note saying "Quot. 1936 is
> uniquely early" or "Not in general use until the 1980s" or the like. I
> also think there's a reasonable chance that there are other quotes out
> there, it's just a sense that's hard to find.
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED
>
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