My husband’s task was a simple one: to buy a couple of bottles of water from the Morrisons opposite the station in case there was no buffet service on board (which would have made a waterless three-hour journey torture). If the train had left on time, he’d have missed it, but he came puffing up the steps full of talk about a ‘meal deal’ and proffering some Walkers crisps. Luckily for him he had also bought water, but what caught my eye was the labelling on the crisps: ‘Grab bag.’
I was aware of the term meaning an emergency bag containing food, water and first aid supplies, which would be kept near the door in emergency or war. A packet of crisps would hardly be a substitute.
The OED seems not to have considered the phrase recently, confining itself to grab bags first noted in 1855 at fancy fairs in America: ‘A bag containing various articles, into which one may dip on payment of a certain sum.’ I’d call that a bran tub, perhaps, or a lucky dip. Indeed the OED quotes the Devon & Exeter Gazette reporting rather charmingly on arrangements for a fête in 1926: ‘Red Cross: The Misses Forbes and Johnson…White Elephant: Miss Dowling. Bran tub: Miss Powlesland.’
Developments brought grab bag the meaning of a collection of assortments, as with ragbag. Nowadays purveyors of women’s handbags use the category grab bag to mean one with perhaps a stiff handle, carried on the lower arm.
For snacks like crisps, grab bag meant one larger than an individual packet but smaller than one for shared catering. Having appealed to the greedy crisp-eater, manufacturers then shrank the size of grab bags. I can’t help thinking that the term capitalises on the tendency to grab whatever’s going. I heard a girl at a coffee shop say to the assistant: ‘Can I grab a flat white?’ And, as Carol Tregorran has discovered in The Archers, now that she has hatched out of her Eleanor Bron instar, no old person’s house is complete without grab rails.
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