Grocery

Was Margaret Thatcher brought up in a grocery? I wouldn’t say so. The Americans would. I’d call her father’s shop in Grantham a grocer’s. He sold grocery. Yet I saw the Times refer to ‘her father’s grocery store’, which sounds doubly American. It’s not just Margaret Thatcher. The Daily Mail referred to Prince Harry befriending a woman ‘who worked in a grocery store near Eton’.

The Americans have been calling a grocer’s a grocery for some time, and a baker’s a bakery. Frances Trollope, the novelist’s mother, noticed it in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and a decade later Dickens wrote of the Americans’ ‘Bakery’, ‘Grocery’, and ‘Bookbindery’.

I was going to say that no one would call a shop a butchery, but I’m told they do, in the most fashionable parts of London (which I seldom haunt). There is the Butchery Ltd (founded 2011) in Bermondsey, the Flock and Herd Butchery in chic Peckham, and of course Jamie’s Barbecoa Butchery near St Paul’s. They may butcher carcases in the shops, but slaughter is these days distanced.

There is some convenience in using grocery as the name of a shop, for it is not easy to form the plural of grocer’s. Is it grocers’ shops? Or should they be thought of as shops belonging to one generic grocer? There have, after all, been books called The Grocer’s Encylopaedia and The Grocer’s Manual, though intended for many grocers. There was even a disease called grocer’s itch. The OED uses as its head-word grocers’ itch but its examples all have grocer’s itch.

The OED also quotes from the ‘Archives of the Grocer’s Company’. You would think that should be in the plural, Grocers’ Company, which is what they call themselves now, although an apostrophe for the plural possessive is an innovation much more recent than the foundation of the Company of Grocers in the 14th century.