Grimmer Girl here, I'm Mignon Foggerty. This week I have a quick and dirty tip about why

we say to boot, another quick and dirty tip about the difference between duck tape and

duck tape. And a meaty middle about the difference between can and may.

Next, after listening to last week's podcast in which I talked about how I came up with

the quick and dirty tips name for the podcast network, a listener named Brian wrote in with

an interesting story about the phrase quick and dirty that also seems to link it to the

Pacific Northwest as I had hypothesized. Brian found some history about the DOS operating

system we know of from Microsoft. We think of DOS, DOS, a standing for disc operating

system. But apparently the predecessor to DOS was developed at a company called Seattle

Computer Products and was originally named QDOS, which stood for quick and dirty operating

system. It was later called 86 DOS and then Microsoft bought it and introduced it as MSDOS

for Microsoft disc operating system. That's obviously not proof that it's a regional

saying, but it's another tidbit that links quick and dirty to the Pacific Northwest. And

is an interesting bit of history to boot pun intended. Thanks Brian.

And after I said that phrase, an interesting bit of history to boot, I started to wonder

why we use the phrase to boot. It's kind of odd, right? Does it have to do with boots

you wear on your feet? The trunk of a car, which is called a boot in Britain, I had to

look it up. So according to the Oxford English Dictionary and etymology online, it goes all

the way back to the old English word boat. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but it's

spelled B-O-T. The word meant something like advantage, help, and to make something good

or better. Eventually, it also came to mean something extra or added into the bargain

as in this citation in the OED from the 1599 play, first part King Edward IV. What boot

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