Cargo theft

[Neal Whitman]

On NPR on Friday, I heard a story about "cargo theft", which I thought was a
transparent term referring to things that "must have fallen off the back of
the truck". In fact, it does, but they were applying it to the multimillion
dollar theft of pharmaceuticals from an Eli Lilly warehouse a couple of
years ago. They first quote a "cargo theft" expert, but stop short of
calling this a cargo theft. Later, the reporter says:

"Eli Lilly confirms they've taken additional steps since then to secure
their cargo. Burges says while the number of pharmaceutical cargo thefts was
down last year, the overall the number of cargo thefts was up eight
percent."

Again, that's not actually calling the warehouse theft a cargo theft, but if
I didn't already have a strong mental definition of cargo as something in
transit, I'd definitely infer that cargo must refer to a company's goods at
any time between their manufacture and their delivery to a retailer.

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/04/152001785/undercover-operation-cracks-drug-thefts

The original theft was also reported on NPR in 2010, and at that time, the
more fitting term "warehouse burglary" was used, although they noted that
pharmaceuticals were more typically stolen in transit. In this context, they
used the terms "freight theft", "truckload theft" and "cargo theft" (in the
compound "cargo theft gangs").
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/03/huge_prescription_drug_burglar.html

So it looks like the term "cargo" may be broadening a bit in the last couple
of years, if these two data points are representative. COCA has 5 hits for
"cargo [theft]," all of them consistent with the traditional definition of
"cargo". This new definition of "cargo" is not in OED, either. An ADS-L
archive search does not turn up mentions of it.

Neal

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org