Grow Your Irritation

July 16, 2010 6:02 PM

How did the phrase "grow a business" and its various forms originate?

English people: lately I've been seeing the verb 'grow' used in a variety of economic contexts:

"Grow your wealth"

"We want to grow the local economy"

"Grow a business with our fantastic product"

It really annoys me to hear all of this, though, because it sounds completely wrong.

Can you legitimately use the word 'grow' like that? Where did this usage of the verb in an economic / business context come from, and when did it spring up? I've noticed it a lot recently, and it seems to be a new thing, but I could be wrong. Thanks for the help!

posted by Despondent_Monkey to Writing & Language (11 answers total)

I can't give you a citation, but I know the first time I heard it was from Bill Clinton, in a speech. And it struck me as odd at the time, because I was sure I had never heard it before.
posted by copperykeen at 6:11 PM on July 16, 2010

Why does it sound wrong? Things that increase in size grow. It doesn't have to be a concrete object which grows. Abstractions can grow, whether they be wealth, an economy, or the market capitalization of a company.
posted by dfriedman at 6:13 PM on July 16, 2010

It is a metaphor in which the economy or the business is compared to a plant or a crop, and as such it can be justified, though it still sounds awkward and inelegant (I hate it too). I also first remember hearing it from Bill Clinton during his "It's the Economy, stupid" campaign. He would say that we needed to "grow the economy". I guess they felt that saying they wanted to "Improve the economy" made it sound too much like the economy was really bad, and they wanted only a positive message or something like that. From there it seems to have just been accepted as standard usage, particularly by politicians. Sort of like how "impact" became a commonly used verb for people who couldn't figure out the difference between "effect" and "affect".
posted by wabbittwax at 6:20 PM on July 16, 2010

Here's an article from the New York Times in 1992 that talks about the use of the phrase in a debate between GHWB and WJC.
posted by wabbittwax at 6:30 PM on July 16, 2010

I think that the difference you're talking about may be the use of the verb "to grow" transitively versus intransitively. When speaking of living things it seems the verb can be used either way - "The farmer grew crops." "The crops grew." From a cursory check in Google Books and Google News I don't see it used transitively like this when referring to a business or a company until 1990.
posted by XMLicious at 6:32 PM on July 16, 2010

I think it may have come from a book from the 80's I read.
The book was and is called "Growing a business" by Paul Hawken.
posted by jade east at 6:42 PM on July 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

It sounded wrong the first time I heard it, too - so wrong that I corrected the person.

I don't know its origin, but the reason "grow" as a transitive verb with an abstract object sounds so wrong to me is that grow + object traditionally implies raising the thing from scratch, when in corporate-speak it simply means "make (object) grow." When a farmer grows corn, he plants the seeds and oversees the whole process. When I say "the potato salad grew mold," I mean there wasn't mold there yesterday - not that there was an existing blob of mold that the potato salad made bigger. When people talk about "growing the business," they're usually not talking about starting from scratch - they're talking about taking something already there and increasing its size. So, at least in my mind, it's a usage/definition that isn't used and doesn't really work.

(Maybe someone more etymologically inclined than me can tell me how right or wrong this is.)
posted by Metroid Baby at 7:04 PM on July 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Definitely agree with the previous poster that the first person I heard use "grow" transitively was Bill Clinton, who talked about "growing the economy." I'm sure he wasn't the first, but I'd say he definitely helped popularize that construction.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 7:18 PM on July 16, 2010

Obama and co. do it all the time, which I think is great, since by doing so they legitimize its use to the frustration of prescriptivists everywhere.
posted by P.Westermanii at 7:55 PM on July 16, 2010

Came in to cite Paul Hawken, of Erewhon, smith & Hawken, etc.
posted by theora55 at 8:21 PM on July 16, 2010

AHD4, via dictionary.com:

Usage Note: Grow has been used since medieval times as an intransitive verb, as in Our business has been growing steadily for 10 years. It has been used with an object since the 18th century, meaning "to produce or cultivate," as in We grow corn in our garden. But the transitive use applied to business and nonliving things is quite new. It came into full bloom during the 1992 presidential election, when nearly all the candidates were concerned with "growing the economy."

posted by mendel at 9:30 PM on July 16, 2010 [1 favorite]