HARD GRAFT
[Q] From Don Chandler: “What does the expression hard graft mean? Is it a British expression? If graft is a kind of unfair gain, maybe hard graft is brutally unfair.”
[A] This meaning of graft has much more to do with burying people than with the American sense of corruption. It seems that both it and grave are from the same Germanic root that meant to dig. The verb survives in modern German and Dutch but has died out in English (though engrave is still around). So hard graft was heavy digging, in later years any kind of hard manual labour, and so figuratively any gruelling task. This sense survives in Britain and Australia, but is not so well known in America. We in Britain have learned graft for corruption, on the other hand, though we don’t use it so much. Another sense of graft, for propagating a plant by inserting a piece of it into the stem of another plant, actually comes from the Greek word meaning to write. This moved into French to mean a pencil, and was taken up as a word for the technique, as that’s what a graft was thought to look like. It may be that the corruption sense comes from this, though it’s not clear how.
