shoddy

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bnjtokyo

shoddy

Postby bnjtokyo » Tue May 06, 2014 8:59 pm

"Shoddy" had its origin in the US Civil War. From the NYTimes ("King Cotton and His Bloody Surrogates" May 5, 2014):
"Manufacturers mixed old wool with new to make cheaper cloth. Recycled wool was known as shoddy — a word that permanently entered the language after the “shoddy scandals” of 1861-62 revealed just how shoddy that cheap cloth was."

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Slava
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Re: shoddy

Postby Slava » Tue May 06, 2014 9:27 pm

To bad no one seems to know where the term originally came from. Probably some slang in the industry that caught on but was never written down.

An older related term I came across while looking is mungo.
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