‘Is it anything to do with cockle-picking?’ asked my husband, confident he was on the right track. Naturally he wasn’t.
We’d just heard that the economy, growing by 0.6 per cent, was ‘going gangbusters’. The nearest my husband could get was gangmasters, a word we had both learned in 2004, when at least 21 Chinese migrants drowned in Morecambe Bay while picking cockles for a gangmaster, later sent to prison. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 then made it a crime to be in charge of people harvesting shellfish or agricultural produce without a licence.
Twenty years earlier, the name of the film Ghostbusters was added to the world’s vocabulary. An accompanying song went: ‘If there’s something weird/ And it don’t look good/ Who you gonna call?’ The answer was Ghostbusters, but I wonder whether this formulation subconsciously lay behind the annoying train announcement in which the answer is to text 61016.
Ghostbusters was a blockbuster. As a name for a successful film it was coined in 1942 soon after the phrase blockbuster bombs.
Busting things was an American preoccupation. In the 19th century, pestiferous weevils brought a reaction from bug busters. In the 1920s, Prohibition saw booze-busters. In 1924, William Wyler’s first silent film short was called The Crook Buster. So in 1936 when a ‘true crime’ radio series began, it was called Gang Busters. In its coverage of the phrases like gangbusters or go gangbusters, the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t discuss the success of this 21-year series. At the beginning of each episode, an impression of energy was conveyed by sound effects of sirens, shooting and squealing tyres. But the OED does quote the writer Zora Neale Hurston, in 1942: ‘Man, I come on like the Gang Busters, and go off like The March of Time’ (a cinema newsreel series). Last week, Grant Fitzner, chief economist at the ONS, said: ‘To paraphrase the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, you could say the economy is going gangbusters.’ Keating often used the phrase in the 1990s. My husband might not understand it, but he does know a parallel phrase from a century ago: going great guns.
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