{"id":1500,"date":"2009-09-04T16:36:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T15:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=1500"},"modified":"2009-09-04T16:36:15","modified_gmt":"2009-09-04T15:36:15","slug":"busing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=1500","title":{"rendered":"Busing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently while reading Douglas Coupland novel <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1596915005\/omniglot-20\"><em>Gum Thief<\/em><\/a> I came across a used of bus(ing) that I hadn&#8217;t heard before &#8211; one of the characters talks about &#8220;busing&#8221; tables, which sounded a bit strange to me. I&#8217;m familiar with the word busboy, but haven&#8217;t been quite sure what a busboy did. Now I&#8217;ve discovered that a busboy, busgirl or busser is someone who works in a restaurant clearing and laying (busing) tables and helping the waiting staff &#8211; a kind of assistant waiter. I&#8217;ve never heard this expression being used in the UK though and, as far as I know, no equivalent position exists here &#8211; waiters and waiteresses are normally responsible for clearing and laying tables.<\/p>\n<p>The use of busing to refer to clearing tables was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.etymonline.com\/index.php?term=bus\">apparently<\/a> first attested to 1913 and probably comes from the four-wheeled cart used to carry dishes.<\/p>\n<p>In the UK the word busing might be used in the context of transporting people by bus, especially school children. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Desegregation_busing_in_the_United_States\">Wikipedia<\/a> busing is &#8220;The transportation of schoolchildren, by bus, to schools in other neighbourhoods in order to alleviate social inequalities or to achieve racial integration.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Are busing or to bus used in other English-speaking countries? If so, what does in mean?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently while reading Douglas Coupland novel Gum Thief I came across a used of bus(ing) that I hadn&#8217;t heard before &#8211; one of the characters talks about &#8220;busing&#8221; tables, which sounded a bit strange to me. I&#8217;m familiar with the word busboy, but haven&#8217;t been quite sure what a busboy did. Now I&#8217;ve discovered that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}