July 21, 2000

bill of goods

While composing an email to a vendor to complain about their support, I came to wonder how being "sold a bill of goods," which sounds to me like a legitimate transaction, came to mean being ripped off.

Guest contributor: James E. Clapp, author of Random House Webster's Dictionary of the Law, in bookstores August 15.

You're right on the money: There is nothing intrinsically bad about a bill of goods. Until relatively recently, the phrase simply meant a list or selection of merchandise ordered or purchased.

The bill in this phrase comes from a word for--of all things--'bubble'. The Latin term bulla was used by the Romans for 'bubble, boss, stud', or pretty much anything of that general description. In Medieval Latin the term was used for the blob of wax with which an official document was sealed. By extension, bulla (or the variant billa, which became bill in English) came to refer to the document to which the seal was affixed.

In time the presence of the seal became irrelevant, and bill was used to refer to written documents generally--especially those of a rather formal or legally significant nature. The word is no longer used in a generic sense, but survives in a wide range of meanings for specific kinds of writings, from dollar bill to Treasury bill, handbill to legislative bill.

Very often the term connotes an itemized list ("bill of rights," "bill of fare," or simply "bill"--a list of charges for which payment is requested). In commercial contexts, especially in the United States, the term was used for a list of items purchased, and by extension for the items themselves. Nineteenth century texts on bookkeeping give sample ledger entries for sales of a "bill of crockery," "bill of ready-made clothing," and the like; but the most general and usual form was simply bill of goods.

This phrase was reasonably common in legal cases through the 1950s, and is still occasionally seen, as in this sentence from a 1995 law review article: "Economists often test theories about economic efficiency in terms of what a willing buyer would pay to a willing seller for a certain item or bill of goods." But the phrase in its original sense has largely dropped out of use.

To sell a bill of goods today usually means 'to put something over on someone'. This usage appears to have arisen in the 1920s. No one knows exactly how it got started; but as long as there have been commercial transactions there has been fraud, so the association of the two in this phrase apparently struck a chord. Inducing people to order a bill of goods by exaggerating their quality, and even taking money for goods that never materialize at all, are familiar concepts, as centuries of court records attest. In a rather colorful example, a 1949 case in the North Carolina Supreme Court concerned a textile mill's complaint that it had been fraudulently induced to purchase a bill of goods including an item for 148,227 pounds of dyed cotton, only to find "that 100 bales of said merchandise . . . was not dyed cotton but was of a quality greatly inferior, which was known as dyed waste or 'frog hair', as the defendants then well knew."

Although bill of goods in the current sense of 'something fraudulent, deceptive, exaggerated' is usually associated with the verb sell, it is often used alone. A recent law review article about proposed "patient bill of rights" legislation contains this example, which manages to wrap together several meanings of bill: "The bill of rights formulation has also allowed for further permutations--with Democrats deriding Republican proposals as a bill of goods and a bill of wrongs, and Republicans arguing that the Democrats' approach creates a lawyer's right to bill."

James Clapp