Bootleg History

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. I’ve been thinking about bootlegs, Martha.

You have? Because I just came back from Franklin County, Virginia, the moonshine capital of the world?

You know what? That might be the reason I was thinking of it.

Bootleg is a really interesting term that has more than 100 years of history, and it’s changed.

And I think it may be the perfect example of how a word is modified through history to fit the circumstances of the period.

Okay, let’s hear it.

Let me lay this out for you.

Bootleg first appears to refer to this way that people were literally bringing liquor into the reservations of the Native Americans. White folks, Europeans, would put bottles of liquor in their pants, which is in violation of the rules, and bring it for sale into these reservations. So they were literally bootlegging. Through the next decades, the term continued to be used to mean, you know, illegally distributing alcohol or illegally selling alcohol. And it also came to refer to illegally selling books or music. We think of bootlegging of music as being a modern thing or a product of the internet age, but really it was already happening back then.

People would illegally press records and sell them. And then this term comes up in the 1960s, which shows the continuing life of bootlegging. And this is buttlegging, where people would bring in cigarettes from places with no taxes or lower cigarette taxes, and the buttleggers would then sell them illegally in shops and stores.

And you can still find this term being used by police today.

Butt-legging is selling cigarettes without the proper license or stamp.

No kidding.

Yeah, because different states have different kind of regulation on cigarettes, right?

Or different countries, for that matter.

And the term continued to be used to refer to knockoffs.

You might make knockoff jeans, so call them bootleg jeans, or knockoff purses, or this and that.

Then we get to the 80s and 90s, and bootleg kind of finds its home as a way to refer to the digital borrowing of music.

I hesitate to say theft of music because you’re copying something, so the original is still there.

But it’s the unlicensed use, the unlicensed distribution of movies, of music, of books, of e-books, and this sort of thing.

And we also see bootleg come up in slang to mean less than legitimate.

It’s directly related to that use, but you can apply it to people.

I could say that she is kind of bootleg, meaning she’s not really worthy of my respect.

She’s a little janky, not quite like all buttoned up.

It’s kind of the opposite of legit.

If you are legit, it means you’re respectable.

I mean, at least in the slangy kind of way.

You deserve my…

But if I’m bootleg, I don’t.

Yeah, bootleg, you don’t.

So we have this term over 100 years kind of continue to be modified.

And you can see each step of the way, it makes perfect sense.

But if you look at the two ends of its life, they’re very different.

Really different.

And there’s also the football term, of course.

Bootleg?

A bootleg play in football is when I believe the quarterback pretends to throw the ball but doesn’t, actually tucks it under his arm and runs.

Oh, that’s called a bootleg as well.

I did not know.

But it’s related to the idea of this unorthodox or illegitimate kind of maneuver.

Stuffing it where it shouldn’t be.

I love this term, and there are many terms like this in English where you can see the full panorama of possibility of how we take a word, adopt it into a particular sphere of influence, and use it in a way that makes perfect sense but isn’t exactly like its parentage.

Yeah, but it’s very cool when you lay out the footprints of bootleg that way.

Very interesting.

I’d love to do some more of these with slang.

If there’s a slang word that you think has a great life in English, let me know.

Words@waywordradio.org, 877-929-9673.