Factory vs. Plant

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is J.W. I’m from Cedar Hill, Texas, near Dallas.

Welcome to the show, J.W. How can we help you?

Well, I was wondering why a factory is called a plant. I did a little bit of web research and found a lot of things about it, but not why.

Okay, so you don’t work in one necessarily.

No, no. I work in a ministry, and we have the phrase church plant. But you could substitute the word planting for that, and it would make perfect sense what the analogy is. But with a place that produces cars or something, it doesn’t make any sense.

At first, I thought maybe it was an archaic thing. I grew up in the Midwest, and there’s plants everywhere. But then I thought, no, they talk about on the news today that GM plant in Arlington, Texas, is going to make all the SUVs or whatever it is now. They still use that term, and it just doesn’t really make any sense to me.

Well, just to be clear, what is a church plant? I mean, I’m picturing palms on Palm Sunday, but that’s not what you’re talking about, right?

No, no, no. It’s a new church. Like when a denomination or a large church starts a new one, then they’re planting a new church, usually in an area that’s underserved, like an urban area.

Got it. It’s the same principle, though, as for the factories or the manufacturing, which is you are physically putting something in place. When you plant a plant, you are putting it in the ground. You’re affixing it to that particular position. And so we’re talking about the physical putting of something down onto the ground.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, it occurred to me at one point that maybe a satellite factory, aside from the main one, could be planted, just like a church. But I couldn’t find anything to substantiate that that was the case, or maybe that originally it meant a secondary place that’s put in.

No, it’s nothing more complicated than the fact that it’s just put there. A thing that you plant is a thing that’s put there. There are some extended uses of plant, which to me are really interesting. When you said church plant, I thought about physical plant used in discussions of facilities, which often refer to not so much the location of the buildings, but actually what is in them. Like we have a giant cooling and heating system, or we have a big machinery over there, a printing press, and this is all part of the physical plant of the building.

And then in the UK, they have a really interesting use of plant, which refers to heavy machinery like backhoes and tractors. And so you will see signs about plant crossings.

Oh, really?

No, they don’t mean that Tolkien’s Ents are marching across the road. They actually mean this is where, say, dump trucks and bulldozers and so forth are coming back across the road.

That’s interesting. That’s very cool. Building a plant. But it still refers to, from almost a financial or business organization sense, all of the equipment and machinery that together makes up this operation or this enterprise. That’s the plant.

Who knew?

I see. So not so much the building as just the totality.

Everything.

Yeah, all the non-human physical resources, basically.

Interesting. So if you or I were driving in England and we saw a sign that said plant crossing, we would expect this building to be coming across.

No, we would get our cameras just in case. But no, more than likely it would be a bulldozer or something like that.

I would be expecting elms crossing the street really slowly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you so much.

Well, great.

Thank you.

All right, thank you. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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