franchise

[Victor Steinbok]

This is just a stray opinion, but, I believe, one should look at the
pattern. There have been quite a few terms that originated "in
Hollywood" or, more broadly, from film-making and film-distribution
businesses. Some of them spread right away, while others were hidden
from public view for years before catching on. It was Hollywood
sausage-making at its finest. I believe, we've had a number of terms
discussed here. And the 1930s would have been the right time for many of
them to appear in public (the terms, I mean) for the first time. Those
that caught on got a listing, others had to wait their turn. It seem
that franchise might have been one of the latter, as the context is the
same, not just the meaning. So the term "franchise" may well have been a
part of studio jargon since the early 1930s, but was not exposed until
much later. So the 1936 cite is not so much an outlier as it is rare
case of sausage-making exposure.

I suppose, it's only a theory. But it's a type of theory (context,
context, context!) that I've largely stuck to since I started posting
here. (Does anyone recall "leathernecks"?)

VS-)



On 2/8/2011 2:11 PM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> 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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