This week: sale vs sales. What's the difference? Does it matter? We get into it below. Here we go:
Welcome to the most awkward Monday of the year. Here we are, right between Christmas and New Year's, where some of us are off for the holidays, others are working, and not a few of us are working even while we're meant to be on holiday. But, the one thing we can agree on is that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, very close to you, something is on sale. Maybe it's an after-Christmas blowout or a New Year's extravaganza, maybe it's a holiday discount, or even just a good, old-fashioned, clearance rack, the one thing we can be sure of is that everything must go!
Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little. Over the past two decades, as online sales platforms and just-in-time stocking practices have become ubiquitous, the kind of mid-holiday (or pre- or post-holiday) in-store sales have become a little calmer, but the impact they have had on our language has only intensified. In addition to the plethora of words we've adapted as synonyms for "a reduced price," we have added a new layer to the strata of "sale" by making it a kind of event1.
So, let's take a look at the word sale. It's got a long history and layer upon layer of uses, best exemplified by this simple question: do "sale" and "sales" mean the same thing? Grammatically speaking, yes, they do. They are both nouns and, in fact, sales is just the plural form of sale, right? Well, yes, but. Let's start with the definition2 of sale from Merriam-Webster:
the transfer of ownership of and title to property from one person to another for a price
a selling of goods at bargain prices
and then this subdefinition denoted as the plural form:
operations and activities involved in promoting and selling goods or services
As we know, the more use cases and definitions a word has, the older it is. Sale is no exception3. It comes (probably) from proto-Germanic4 and achieved its current form by about the year 1500. More relevant to this article is that the use of sale to mean a discount on selected items comes from the 1860s. And that takes care of the first two meanings listed above. But, what about that third? Where did the split between sale and sales happen? Etymology Online says:
"of or pertaining to sale, sales, or the business of selling," word-forming element from genitive of sale (n.), by 1520s, in salesman. Cf. saleswork "work done for sale" (1775). For earlier use of similar formations, compare craftsman, oarsman, both Middle English. Sales tax is attested by 1886; sales clerk by 1863; sales associate by 1946. Sales representative is from 1910.
Which doesn't exactly answer the question. What it does suggest is that the split between sale and sales is an old one. That there has been a differentiation between the act of selling something as an individual and the art of selling things to the masses for almost the entire history of the word in modern English.
So, what's the point of all this? For myself, I'm not opposed to sales (discounts) or sales (marketing) per se. But I don't really like going shopping for sales. I don't think they're worth the time and effort and dealing with all the other shoppers is...not fun. And the idea that I need to rush out and buy the latest gadget or gizmo just because it's on sale right now is not one I subscribe to5...
Here in Japan, every year, stores offer year-end discount grab bags of goodies called "fukubukuro" (literally "lucky bags"). The bags are sealed and you have to buy them blind. The stores promise that the goods inside will have a certain value (usually ten to fifteen percent more than the purchase cost of the fukubukuro) and that the bags themselves are limited in quantity.
I like to ask my students if they plan to buy any of them. The answers tend to vary year to year based on what the stores have promised to include in them. One constant is that many clothing stores actually put enough high-value goods in them to make them worthwhile. Fukubukuro from other retailers though, not so much. But the follow-up question I ask is more telling: are you buying the bag because you think it's a good value, or are you buying it for the thrill of seeing whether you got anything cool?
So, if we turn that around, what is the store really selling during their sale? Hint: it's not the actual items in the bag. Brand loyalty is a much more valuable commodity to retailers (and manufacturers) than the actual salable items they have in their stores. And I'm not judging. Buying lucky bags is fun. There's a palpable excitement in the stores as people open them up in the aisles and show off what they got. My favorite coffee roaster has a lucky bag that always has a decent roast plus a few treats and snacks that I look forward to buying every year. But it's worth thinking about what the stores are actually selling, I mean, after all, I go to the same store to buy the same bag every year, which is full of things I can buy for myself during any other time of the year, so what's on sale again?
Anyway, the store opens soon and I have to get there before they run out of lucky bags, so...
Stay curious and happy New Year!
J
Leaving aside the question of whether anything being sold on Black Friday or Cyber Monday is actually on sale, which, spoiler, it's not.
The full definition has a few other meanings that I'm not going to get into this week, but it's worth the reminder that dictionaries have far more information than just what a word means, as evidenced by the twenty minutes I spent reading about the city of Salé in northwestern Morocco.
Source: Word Origins, the Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z. Notably, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins doesn't list an entry for "sale" or "sell." Instead, it has three entries: sell down the river, sell like hot cakes, and sell the pass. Yikes.
Not to be confused with PIE. It's been a while since I've defined this, so, as a quick refresher: PIE stands for Proto-Indo-European, which is the theoretical root language from which many modern languages evolved. The oldest words in English are often theorized to have their origin in PIE, and to have arrived in English via several middlemen like Latin and French. Meanwhile, Proto-Germanic is, possibly, a child of, or possibly sibling to, PIE. It originated around 500 BCE and eventually led to modern German and its related languages.
Back in the day, when stores really did need to clear out their inventory before new products could be stocked, I might have been a bit less cynical. These days, however, there are not any real discounts to be had that can't be had at other times of the year.