What do you call the shop on the corner? What do you call the shop where you get your miscellaneous stuff? I grew up in Toronto, where they were called "convenience stores," "smoke shops," and sometimes "Becker's" or "Mac's" (names of chains that got genericized). In New York, I learned to call them "bodegas." In Montreal, "depanneurs" or "the dep". In Costa Rica, we went to the pulperia (or "pulpe") for supplies, and in Honduras, we went to the "super." Here in London, they're "bottle shops," "off-licenses," "newsagents," "offies," and "cornershops" (not all identical in meaning).
Hi Grant! I grew up in the 1950's and 60's in Alameda, a suburb of San Francisco. Back then there were none of the supermarkets that are so common today that we don't even think of them as super-markets, and these supermarkets don't just take up corners but entire blocks.
Anyway, we did all of our grocery shopping at what were known as corner markets, for the larger markets, or corner stores, for the smaller markets. Very prosaic, I know, but that's what everyone called them. It's funny, now that I think about it, that all the markets in town were on corners. If we needed to refer to a specific corner market or store, we would call it by name, such as William Brother's Market or Al's store. But generally people shopped at the market closest to home and didn't need to specify. One exception was what we called the Church Market, a half mile from our home and kitty-corner from our church. We would sometimes go the extra distance because they had the best wax candies!
I bet that the expression "to have a corner on the market" has something to do with corner markets, doesn't it?
samaphore said:
I bet that the expression “to have a corner on the market†has something to do with corner markets, doesn't it?
Hope you didn't have any money on that bet! Dictionary.com provides this derivation, from The American Heritage ® Dictionary of Idioms:
"This idiom uses corner in the sense of 'drive would-be buyers into a corner.' [Early 1800s]"
Thanks, Dilettante. I never would have guessed that. I love making wild little bets like this with my friends and family. Putting our money where our mouths are makes things a little more interesting - though I'm not talking big money, so talk is cheap, just not free.
In the case of this idiom, I imagined that the corner in question was a metaphor for a great location, as in a prominent and convenient corner location in town, attracting lots of buyers. You know what they say about real estate and businesses: location, location, location. But now I see that corner is meant in a negative sense, manipulating markets to force buyers to pay more.
This reminds me of my misunderstanding of another market/price idiom, the offensive expression “Jew down.†It wasn't until I was in my thirties, when I saw the idiom in print, that I discovered it wasn't “chew down.†I always thought that haggling was the process of people chewing prices down! I think that my misunderstanding should officially replace the offensive idiom! When people “chew down†prices their mouths actually look like they're chewing!
Where I grew up, there was only one store so everyone referred to it as "the store". We Occasionally people would reference it as either a market or corner store which was funny because it was not on a corner.