Busboy

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Marianne from Chicago.

Hi, Marianne.

Hi, Marianne.

What’s going on in Chicago?

Well, I have been fascinated by the phrase to bus a table.

Why do we bus a table?

When I ask most people, they say because a busboy does it, but that seems to me to be a circular answer.

Yeah, a little bit of one.

Maybe another answer is because we don’t want to eat off somebody else’s dirty plate, but that doesn’t help either.

No.

So why do, it is a weird word.

Why do we bus a table?

So bus a table.

Well, bus a table, it just means to take the dirty dishes and the plates off and take them to the kitchen to be washed, right?

All right.

Right, okay.

Clear it.

All right, so let me just kind of lay out the whole path here, and I’m going to start with the word omnibus.

Ultimately, bussing tables comes from the word omnibus.

From that big old Latin word?

Mm, yeah.

Yeah, and you’re thinking, wait, an omnibus, isn’t that an old-fashioned name for a bus bus, the kind of bus that you might climb aboard to go downtown, right?

Actually, omnibus is what you do in a legislative session where you sort of just put everything under one rule or something.

There we go, yeah, sure.

An omnibus bill is a bill which means you throw in kind of a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and you kind of take care of a lot of things in one bill.

Maybe they’re unrelated, a multipurpose bill, right?

Right.

And so the notion here of omnibus is a lot of varied things altogether.

And in the beginning, let’s say in the, I believe it was the 1800s, when an omnibus started in Paris or in France, they were called the voiture omnibus, the coach for everyone.

And this is the start of the word omnibus in general.

It immediately hopped across the channel into England, where the voiture was dropped off.

That’s V-O-I-T-U-R-E.

And omnibus was left.

And pretty quickly, of course, omnibus was shortened to bus.

And here’s where the history gets interesting.

Bus boy seems to have come from omnibus because in the very beginning, you’ll find it as early as 1888 in the United States, mind you, not in the UK, to refer to the lad that clears the tables.

It was shortened to bus.

And then it was lengthened, which is weird, to busboy.

Busboy.

Right.

Now, nobody calls a busboy a bus anymore, but there was a time in English where you could say that.

And we do use, of course, as you say, the verb to bus tables.

Now, why they referred to this particular lad, or the young man who cleared the tables, as an omnibus, we are not quite sure.

There are two possible explanations.

One, Marianne, as you can probably imagine, is because he had many and varied duties.

He didn’t just pull the dirty dishes off the table.

Maybe he wiped the table, threw down a new tablecloth, set the silverware, put the flowers back, that sort of thing.

Yeah, he did everything.

But you know the other thing?

Think about the bus that we know today.

It’s on four wheels.

And the omnibus, the busboy kind of omnibus, might have pushed a four-wheel cart.

And so that could be a double-decker four-wheel cart.

And you’ve seen these in restaurants, right?

He’s got the dirty dishes underneath.

Maybe there’s an apron or a cloth over it so that you can’t really see the dirty dishes.

And he’s got the clean dishes on top, perhaps.

So the whole path to kind of review here is omnibus is a vehicle.

Then omnibus is a restaurant worker, shortened to bus, expanded to busboy, and then turned into a verb to create bussing tables.

All right.

I will think of that voiture every time I sit in a restaurant.

Yeah, that’s funny, right?

Because we have a tendency to bar from the French and then twist and chop and cut and turn the French into something that’s not really recognizable as French anymore.

Well, they are very fastidious about the use of the French language, so I’m sure they don’t want to use around the world in an incorrect manner.

Well, you know that the thing about the French is, although they’re fastidious about their own language, they’ve done a world of damage to stomp out the regional languages throughout the country of France.

Oh.

Yeah.

Anyway, that’s a sign note unrelated to this.

But there you go, omnibus.

Originally Latin, now it refers to young men who clear tables.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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