Word of the week: Groceries
A bag with different things in it, just like this post.
I apologize for subjecting you to this weird 17-second clip from Donald Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, but I promise you we’ll soon move into more pleasant territory.1
“It says a bag with different things in it.”
Was Trump just discovering the wonder of groceries? Au contraire! In an April 2 story for Rolling Stone, reporter Ryan Bort enumerated five occasions between October 2024 and March 2025 on which Trump had dined out on groceries, calling it “a beautiful word,” “an old-fashioned word,” “sort of a simple word,” and “a descriptive word” (huh?) over and over. “I won [the election] on groceries,” Trump said in a December appearance on Meet the Press. “It’s a very simple word. Who uses the word? I started using the word. The groceries.”
In an April 2 segment, The Daily Show’s Michael Kosta investigated how “Trump’s big, beautiful brain” understands groceries. It’s “every single item of grocery,” Trump once explained, tautologically. Or, even more tautologically: “The groceries are groceries.” Trump has simplified the discourse, as if for the slow-witted: It’s “a basic term.” He has put it plainly: “It sort of means, like, everything you eat.”
“I inherited a grocery situation,” is something Trump told a Newsmax audience. “Groceries have gone through the roof,” he added, sounding a little muddled about how to use this word that “you don’t hear a lot.”
“Grocery prices are a very real issue for millions of Americans,” writes Rolling Stone’s Bort, “but Trump doesn’t even bother to hide that he’s more curious about how funny the word sounds to him, after all these years of McDonald’s and Mar-a-Lago table service.”
Or as Lee Papa, aka The Rude Pundit, put it: “It’s not just that he’s never shopped for groceries. It’s plainly obvious that he’s never spoken to anyone who buys groceries.”
Maybe his fixation with the word has to do with its first syllable: Gross. Which would make sense, because grocery is directly related to gross, and gross is an adjective that’s been attached to Donald J. Trump more than once.2
Grocery is derived from grocer, “a wholesale dealer or merchant,” which entered English in the early 1400s from French, where it was spelled grossier. A grossier or grocer sold items by the gross, a word we still use to mean “twelve dozen,” or 144. In the mid-1400s grocery came along to mean goods, especially foods, sold by a grocer, and by 1615 people were writing about buying groceries, plural. It took a while longer for singular grocery to mean a shop where groceries are sold; the OED’s earliest citation is from 1682.
So, yes, an old-ish word, but still modern, as English vocabulary goes. And still very much in circulation among the common folk like me and thee who shop in grocery stores and do our own cooking.
Speaking of groceries, if you like what you read here you can buy me a tariff-free coffee. Or three! Or ten! Thanks!
And here’s a fun thing, via Etymonline:
Self-service groceries were a novelty in 1913 when a Montana, U.S., firm trademarked the word groceteria (with the ending from cafeteria used in an un-etymological sense) to name them. The term existed through the 1920s.
I’m not quite sure why this sense is “un-etymological”: In the source language, Spanish, the -tería suffix denotes “a place where something [usually business] is done.” So a groceteria is a place where groce[ry] happens, yes?
I searched the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database without success for evidence of a 1913 registration for Groceteria3. What I did find in my investigation was a wonderful website, Groceteria.com, devoted to “exploring chain supermarket history.” It’s a one-man show run by David Gwynn when he isn’t working at his day job as a librarian in Greensboro, North Carolina. He’s been at it since 1999, which is practically the Stone Age, internetally speaking. Check out his methodology! He even posted a fine April Fools’ Day joke.
Speaking of territory, among the places where a new 10 percent tariff will be levied are Heard Island and McDonald Island, which are situated near Antarctica and which are uninhabited except for penguins and elephant seals. Also: “Norfolk Island, which has a population of 2,188 people and lies 1,600km (1,000 miles) north-east of Sydney, was slugged with a tariff of 29% – 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia,” The Guardian reported.
That last link goes to a scholarly paper published in Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal in 2017. Its title: “Trump Is Gross: Taking Political Taste (and Distaste) Seriously.”
There was a fad in the 20th century for American retail names ending in -eria or -teria, a suffix borrowed from Spanish (which places an acute accent, and the stress, on the i) and modeled on cafeteria, which originally (in Spanish-speaking locales) was a shop that sold coffee. I remember a Typewriteria store in Los Angeles, where I grew up; it sold typewriters. The accent was on the ter syllable. There’s still a Carpeteria chain in Northern California; it sells floor coverings. The first self-service laundry facility was called a Wash-a-teria; it opened to the public on April 18, 1934 in Fort Worth, Texas. There are still Washaterias, as they’re now spelled, through Texas.
"And still very much in circulation among the common folk like me and thee who shop in grocery stores and do our own cooking."
To be fair, I mainly just heat things up, but I'm pretty sure Donald John Trump has never cooked for himself or—especially—anyone else. He has never scrambled an egg. Never grilled a burger. Toast, ... maybe. But probably not. He cannot drive a car. He cannot type (or read). He cannot do laundry. He has never mowed a lawn, carried a load or raked a leaf. He is a parasite.
Thank you so much for making this term palatable again!
The mangling melon really put a bad taste in my mouth with his... uh, utterances.