In the food service industry, the lowest job on the totem poll is surely that of the busboy, whose sole purpose for eight hours a day is to clear\u2014or bus\u2014the tables of dirty plates, crumpled napkins, and cracker wrappers, often without sharing in the tip. Originally, back in the late nineteenth century, such a person was called an omnibus, a Latin word meaning for all. The name was applied to table-clearers because they usually bussed all the tables, rather than being assigned to a particular waiter or section of the restaurant. Earlier on, in the first half of the nineteenth century, omnibus was also used as a name for a horse-drawn carriage that anyone could hire, though usually such vehicles had assigned and fixed routes. The French called these public modes of transport voiture omnibus, meaning vehicle for all, which was shortened to just omnibus when it was adopted into English, and then (as with the restaurant term) further shortened to just bus. Incidentally, the root of omnibus is the word omni, meaning all; the bus part of the word is simply an inflection used in Latin to make the plural dative case. In a sense, therefore, a busboy is plural-dativeboy.<\/p>\n
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In the food service industry, the lowest job on the totem poll is surely that of the busboy, whose sole purpose for eight hours a day is to clear\u2014or bus\u2014the tables of dirty plates, crumpled napkins, and cracker wrappers, often without sharing in the tip. Originally, back in the late nineteenth century, such a person […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b"],"yoast_head":"\n