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I was at a drive through yesterday. Hardee's, if you must know. As I was waiting for my "fast" food, I found myself staring at the menu board. Nearly everything was listed as a "combo". And the ones that weren't, there were notes all over it saying "make it a combo!" Which got me to wondering, when did combo become a word? It isn't, you know. Combination is a word, but combo is a slang term. It seems to me that the term combo has become so pervasive, especially in the fast food world, that it has become acceptable as a word on its own.

 

I know this happens. Ain't. When I was in school, they used to tell me, "ain't ain't a word." Turns out, they were wrong. Somewhere along the way, ain't was added to the dictionary and is now an actual word, not just laziness. So, I guess it is the same with combo.

 

Just to be sure, I checked everybody's best friend, the OED. (For those of you who have no friends, the Oxford English Dictionary...THE dictionary of dictionaries, if you will.) OED shows that the term combo, listed as slang, meaning combination or partnership, dates back to the 1920's: Below is the entry for the etymology, taken from the OED.

 

1929 DUNNING & ABBOTT Broadway III. 113 [of two dancers] We'd make about the best combo I could imagine. 1931 Amer. Speech VII. 105 Combo, the combination of safe or vault. 1959 in Ibid. (1962) XXXVII. 79 In describing the first poetry-jazz concert at Nebraska University a newspaper reporter referred to the reading of poetry to a jazz accompaniment as a combo. Ibid., Potluck Supper on Slate? Take chicken-rice combo. 1963 Ibid. XXXVIII. 156 Recently, I heard a television commercial in which a woman shopper in a supermarket was heard to exclaim enthusiastically, ‘Me and Tide' some combo!’ 1963 R. I. MCDAVID Mencken's Amer. Lang. xi. 717 Specially made tools to..pull the combo [in safe-breaking].

 

You can see that the first documented usage was from a Broadway play in 1929. One of these days I feel like the OED will update it to include, 2008 Hardee's (McDonald's, Burger King, whatever) "would you like to try a combo with that?"

 

There are also two other definitions for combo;  A white man who lives with an Aboriginal woman, and, a small instrumental band. So, apparently it is not just fast food which is bastardizing the language.

 

And then, just for fun, I looked it up in the NTC's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions which leaves out the Aboriginial definition found in OED, but then adds a new one: a bisexual person. And then offers this example, "Nobody would have thought that Fred's a combo. He's not a combo, he's just confused." Okay....new question, what sitcom writer moonlights as a dictionary writer?