version of economic activity, derived from the character of a particular economic system, as the history of the word shows.
Consume has been in English since C14, from fw consumer, F, and the variant consommer, F (these variants have a complicated but eventually distinct history in French), rw consumere, L – to take up completely, devour, waste, spend. In almost all its early English uses, consume had an unfavourable sense; it meant to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust. This sense is still present in ‘consumed by fire’ and in the popular description of pulmonary phthisis as consumption. Early uses of consumer, from C16, had the same general sense of destruction or waste.
It was from mC18 that consumer began to emerge in a neutral sense in descriptions of bourgeois political economy. In the new predominance of an organized market, the acts of making and of using goods and services were newly defined in the increasingly abstract pairings of producer and consumer, production and consumption. Yet the unfavourable connotations of consume persisted, at least until lC19, and it was really only in mC20 that the word passed from specialized use in political economy to general and popular use. The relative decline of customer, used from C15 to describe a buyer or purchaser, is significant here, in that customer had always implied some degree of regular and continuing relationship to a supplier, whereas consumer indicates the more abstract figure in a more abstract market.
The modern development has been primarily American but has spread very quickly. The dominance of the term has been so great that even groups of informed and discriminating purchasers and users have formed Consumers’ Associations. The development relates primarily to the planning and attempted control of markets which is inherent in large-scale industrial capitalist (and state-capitalist) production, where, especially after the depression of lC19, manufacture was related not only to the supply of known needs (which customer or user would adequately describe) but to the planning of given kinds and quantities of production which required large investment at an early and often predictive stage. The development of modern commercial advertising (persuasion, or penetration of a market) is related to the same stage of capitalism: the creation of needs and wants and of particular ways of satisfying them, as distinct from and in addition to the notification of available supply which had been the main earlier function of advertising (where that kind of persuasion could be seen as puff and puffery). Consumer as a predominant term was the creation of such manufacturers and their agents. It implies, ironically as in the earliest senses, the using-up of what is going to be produced, though once the term was established it was given some appearance of autonomy (as in the curious phrase consumer choice). It is appropriate in terms of the history of the word that criticism of a wasteful and ‘throw-away’ society was expressed, somewhat later, by the description consumer society. Yet the predominance of the capitalist model ensured its widespread and often overwhelming extension to such fields as politics, education and health. In any of these fields, but also in the ordinary field of goods and services, to say user rather than consumer is still to express a relevant distinction.
See WEALTH
A convention was originally a coming together or assembly, from fw convention, F, conventionem, L – assembly, rw convenire, L – to come together. As such it has been used in English since C16, and is still quite often used in this sense. There is a natural extension of use to mean an agreement, and this has been common in English since C15.
The more difficult uses of convention and especially conventional relate to an extension of the sense of agreement to something implicitly customary or agreed, and to a different kind of extension, especially in literature and art, to an implicit agreed method. The extension to the sense of custom is from lC18. It was important in the political controversy about rights, which ironically were being elsewhere (in the United States and France) formally defined by Conventions. But its most common use was in questions of manners and behaviour, and an unfavourable sense soon appeared, in which conventional meant artificial or formal, and by derivation merely old-fashioned. Complaints against conventions and conventional ideas can be readily found from mC19 onwards. Most of the early special uses in art and literature are in the same sense, as part of a normal ROMANTIC (q.v.) preference for spontaneity and innovation. But a more technical sense, in which it was seen that all forms of art contain fundamental and often only implicit conventions of method and purpose, is also evident from mC19 and has since been important in specialized discussion. The degree of formality originally important in convention is now almost wholly lost, except in this specialized use. In normal use convention is indeed the opposite of formal agreement, and can be used quite neutrally. Conventional, however, usually expresses the unfavourable sense. On the other hand, after the invention of the atom and hydrogen bombs, conventional weapons were favourably contrasted (from c. 1950) with nuclear weapons.
See CONSENSUS
Country has two different meanings in modern English: broadly, a native land and the rural or agricultural parts of it.
The word is historically very curious, since it derives from the feminine adjective contrata, mL, rw contra, L – against, in the phrase contrata terra meaning land ‘lying opposite, over against or facing’. In its earliest separate meaning it was a tract of land spread out before an observer. (Cf. the later use of landskip, C16, landscape, C18; in oE landscipe was a region or tract of land; the word was later adopted from Dutch landschap as a term in painting.) Contrata passed into English through oF cuntrée and contrée. It had the sense of native land from C13 and of the distinctly rural areas from eC16. Tyndale (1526) translated part of Mark 5:14 as ‘tolde it in the cyte, and in the countre’.
The widespread specialized use of country as opposed to city began in lC16 with increasing urbanization and especially the growth of the capital, London. It was then that country people and the country house were distinguished. On the other hand countryfied and country bumpkin were C17 metropolitan slang. Countryside, originally a Scottish term to indicate a specific locality, became in C19 a general term to describe not only the rural areas but the whole rural life and economy.
In its general use, for native land, country has more positive associations than either nation or state: cf. ‘doing something for the country’ with ‘doing something for the nation’ or ‘… state’. Country habitually includes the people who live in it, while nation is more abstract and state carries a sense of the structure of power. Indeed country can substitute for people, in political contexts: cf. ‘the country demands’. This is subject to variations of perspective: cf. the English lady who said in 1945: ‘they have elected a socialist government and the country will not stand for it’. In some uses country is regularly distinguished from government: cf. ‘going to the country’ – calling an election. There is also a specialized metropolitan use, as in the postal service, in which all areas outside the capital city are ‘country’.
Countryman carries both political and rural senses, but the latter is stronger and the former is usually extended to fellow-countryman.
