Talk:ram-packed

RFV discussion: January 2018
I just heard this word for the first time last night in TV show from a year or so ago with a clip of Jeremy Corbyn and I wondered if it's a new or just a regional variant of.

He used it in mid-2016 and the Wiktionary page was created in mid-2016 with a formulaic uninformative etymology. Google Ngrams has zero uses recorded with hyphen, space, or as a single word.

I'm not the only one to notice. Here's some articles I've found on the topic:


 * http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the_virtual_linguist/2016/08/ram-packed.html
 * https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2176197/ram-packed-a-new-phrase
 * https://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission/17833/ram-packed
 * https://blog.bham.ac.uk/susanhunston/2016/09/01/jeremys-ram-packed-train/
 * http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=321995
 * https://twitter.com/joshwiddicombe/status/768433875798335488

So let's see if it meets our CFI, if it was a nonce slip of the tongue, or if it has an interesting history we can elucidate via expanding the etymology section and adding citations.

Specifically, was it already in use pre-Corbyn pre-2016, when does it trace back to, and did his usage popularize it, causing it to be begin being widely used? &mdash; hippietrail (talk) 21:35, 17 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I can find uses dating back as far as 1941 - although those are more SOP - meaning packed with a ram. For this more figurative meaning, the earliest I have found so far is 1953. Clearly it was not coined by Corbyn in 2016 - and from the SOP citations, my guess is that it grew out of that, rather than a blend of ram-jam and jam-packed. Also, on the Citations page I added a quote that uses it as an adverb. Kiwima (talk) 01:54, 18 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that. One of the best sounding theories I read in the links I provided was that this has long been a regularly used term in Jamaica and that Corbyn spent time in Jamaica when he was younger. It would be interesting to investigate that angle. &mdash; hippietrail (talk) 22:12, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 20:50, 26 January 2018 (UTC)