At a press briefing in February 2001, when he was Tony Blair’s Rottweiler (aka Prime Minsters’ Press Spokesman), Alastair Campbell declared that the days of the ‘bog standard comprehensive’ were over.
Bog standard here meaning poor quality or, at best, ordinary. This caused some annoyance among Heads of comprehensives and others involved in education and even David Blunkett (Blair’s Rottweiler number two) expressed his abhorrence at the term, saying he neither recognised nor used it.
Campbell later dismissed his comment as an ‘off-the-cuff-accident’, ignoring the rather obvious fact that as Blair’s ‘Press Spokesman’ this was precisely the sort of gaff he was there to prevent or suppress.
What is the origin of this oft-used term? The truth is no-one really knows although the connection with ‘bog’ as a word for toilet is obvious and it may have circulated in some factories in the late 60s and early 70s in its commonly used sense as toilet, perhaps as a shortened form of bog-house (a phrase now lost in the mists of time). The origins of the other usage – bog standard – although probably not as common as bog is also unknown. There doesn’t appear to be any link with bog as a marshy area or swamp, although there are a number of derogatory terms associated with bog, most notably bog-trotter, an abusive term for an Irishman.
For a number of years I, and I suspect many others, laboured under the illusion that the ‘b.o.g.’ in bog standard derived from ‘British or German’ and was used, primarily, in the early days of industrial development, in the USA. American steel was considered rather crude and of poor quality and either German or British steel was preferred. There is probably a grain of truth in this, the steel for Jim Bowie’s famous knife was made in Sheffield and in the city centre, near Sheffield Hallam University, there is a plaque commemorating the forge and workshop where the steel was made. However, as for the phrase bog standard, there is no evidence at all to support this origin, on either side of the Atlantic. It’s a good story but like much else featuring in this discussion, although the meaning is quite clear, its origins remain a mystery.