Dossier definition webster11/10/2023 ![]() Increasing Commuting by Transit and Ridesharing, 1980 The fears arising from the recent transit strike in New York City of “Gridlock,” “Spillback” and dangerously unhealthy carbon monoxide levels underscore our concern about the inescapable relationship of mass transit, pollution and congestion. The literal sense of gridlock is defined as “a traffic jam in which a grid of intersecting streets is so completely congested that no vehicular movement is possible,” and the figurative one as “a situation resembling gridlock (as in congestion or lack of movement).” When one considers how long we have had the grid system in cities (well over a hundred years) and how long we have had traffic (well before we had a grid system), it is surprising how recent the word gridlock is our earliest use dates from 1980. Zach Wichter and Nathan Diller, USA Today, 21 Sept. Members of Congress are still in discussions about Washington’s next funding bill, but as gridlock continues, the country is inching closer to another government shutdown. With the start of the United Nations General Assembly, expected to be the largest gathering of its kind in nearly a decade, the New York City Department of Transportation released their list of Gridlock Alert days through the end of 2023. Few of us would call any of those “dossiers.The United Nations General Assembly was in session last week, as was the United States Congress, and among the words that spiked as a result was gridlock, in both literal and figurative uses. We all have “files,” kept about us by government, commercial, and medical entities and kept by us for finances, contacts, medical records, etc. It’s just a “file” containing detailed information. No dictionary specifies that a “dossier” has anything secret, intriguing, or even special in it. A website offering training on compliance with regulations covering medical devices, for example, offers a rather dense explanation of the difference between a “technical file” and a “design dossier.” (The “design dossier” is far more detailed than the “technical file.”) Web design might call for a “dossier” of all the styles, templates, etc. In some situations, though, “dossier” is a technical term with specific meanings. So the word “dossier” has more in common with your doctor’s collection of files than with the intelligence community’s secret information. The Oxford English Dictionary says “dossier” entered English in 1880, from the French sense of a “ ‘bundle of papers’, which from their bulging are likened to a back (dos).” It comes from “dos,” the French word for “back,” which is in turn derived from “dorsum,” Latin for back. “Dossier,” the French word for such a compendium of spine-labeled folders, was picked up by English speakers in the late 19th century. Gather together various documents relating to the affairs of a certain individual, sort them into separate folders, label the spine of each folder, and arrange the folders in a box. In other words, “dossier” is just a fancy word for “file.” But thanks to World War II, the Cold War, and spy novels, “dossier” seems to be the preferred term when espionage or intrigue is involved. But within a week, “dossier” had appeared more than a thousand times, nearly always in the company of “Trump.”Ī “dossier” is simply “a collection of documents concerning a particular person or matter,” as Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines it. The doctor would refer to it as “your file.”Įven if you’re not a spy (or Donald Trump), you have “dossiers.” You just didn’t know it.īefore news reports revealed the (maybe) existence of a (maybe) explosive “dossier” that the Russians (maybe) had on Trump, the word “dossier” had appeared in Nexis barely 150 times in the previous month. When you went into the doctor’s consultation room, on the desk would probably be a manila folder with your medical history in it. If you walked into the doctor’s office and, behind the receptionist, saw a cabinet containing rows and rows of fat manila folders, each with some letters or numbers on the spine, you would probably think of it as a “filing cabinet,” or as shelves filled with “files.” Let’s assume your doctor has not gone totally electronic.
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