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dig

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  • Type: Improvement Improvement
  • Status: Open Open
  • Priority: Minor Minor
  • Resolution: Unresolved
  • Affects Version/s: None
  • Fix Version/s: None
  • Component/s: Extending existing entries
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Description

digs
noun [BrE, dated, colloquial]

Without wishing to be rude, this is a question for the slightly older British English speakers on the list. What would you put as a Catalan equivalent (or description) for 'digs' (e.g. 'student digs'). I ask this as I'm not 100% certain exactly what it means. I've looked in other dictionaries and they say 'rented room' and I'm not sure whether this quite covers it. It is not a word I would ever use and made me laugh when my mother used it on the phone this morning ('do you remember Steve? He shared digs with Brian when he was at university'). I'm sorry, but it just sounded very 1970s. The unfortunate part is, I think she thought she was being very 'hip' and 'with it' by saying 'digs' as opposed to 'accomodation'

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Gill Martin added a comment -

I guess that means Max and me? The word was already VERY old-fashioned when I went to university in 1970. It sounds Dickensian, though I've mostly come across it in stories about actors of the Gielgud generation touring the country with a play. My own mother (born 1925 and from the north) would use it, though - to refer to the flat I was sharing - and it would make me laugh too.

To me, digs are the type of accommodation where you rent a room in a house belonging to a landlady who provides breakfast and an evening meal and probably also does your laundry and cleans the place. Think of a female Rigsby with cooking and cleaning skills! But the meaning seems to have been extended (by northern mothers?) to mean shared accommodation when you're at university/away from home for the first time.

I would translate digs as something like shared, rented, temporary accommodation away from your home town.

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Gill Martin added a comment - I guess that means Max and me? The word was already VERY old-fashioned when I went to university in 1970. It sounds Dickensian, though I've mostly come across it in stories about actors of the Gielgud generation touring the country with a play. My own mother (born 1925 and from the north) would use it, though - to refer to the flat I was sharing - and it would make me laugh too. To me, digs are the type of accommodation where you rent a room in a house belonging to a landlady who provides breakfast and an evening meal and probably also does your laundry and cleans the place. Think of a female Rigsby with cooking and cleaning skills! But the meaning seems to have been extended (by northern mothers?) to mean shared accommodation when you're at university/away from home for the first time. I would translate digs as something like shared, rented, temporary accommodation away from your home town.
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Gill Martin added a comment -

2 more comments:

First, Jonathan knows this word - he came across it when he moved to London in the late 80s.

I also came across it last night in "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (1991) by Will Self (born 1961). The story "Understanding the Ur-Bororo" is set at the University of Reigate: "After his first year at Reigate Janner moved out of his digs at Mrs Beasley's on Station Road, and into a shed on the edge of the North Downs."

So much for both our intuitions about it being dated. But the Will Self example fits with my feeling that "digs" should involve living in a landlady's house.

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Gill Martin added a comment - 2 more comments: First, Jonathan knows this word - he came across it when he moved to London in the late 80s. I also came across it last night in "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (1991) by Will Self (born 1961). The story "Understanding the Ur-Bororo" is set at the University of Reigate: "After his first year at Reigate Janner moved out of his digs at Mrs Beasley's on Station Road, and into a shed on the edge of the North Downs." So much for both our intuitions about it being dated. But the Will Self example fits with my feeling that "digs" should involve living in a landlady's house.
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Max Wheeler added a comment -

"Digs" was the normal informal word when I was a student at Oxford in the latter half of the 60s. I don't think it was ever 'hip'. I think it dated because the type of accommodation it denoted went out of use. As others have said, it denoted a rented room with some facilities provided by the resident landlord/landlady, e.g. breakfast, laundry, cleaning. Shared digs usually meant people having individual rooms in the same house. In one set of digs (n.b. "digs" is plurale tantum) I shared, two sharers shared a sitting room. The institution was replaced by shared houses/flats without resident landlord.

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Max Wheeler added a comment - "Digs" was the normal informal word when I was a student at Oxford in the latter half of the 60s. I don't think it was ever 'hip'. I think it dated because the type of accommodation it denoted went out of use. As others have said, it denoted a rented room with some facilities provided by the resident landlord/landlady, e.g. breakfast, laundry, cleaning. Shared digs usually meant people having individual rooms in the same house. In one set of digs (n.b. "digs" is plurale tantum) I shared, two sharers shared a sitting room. The institution was replaced by shared houses/flats without resident landlord.

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