Wordwatch: Rammed

“In his first in-person conference address since his thumping general election victory, the Prime Minister told a rammed Manchester Exchange Hall that his administration will bring “hope and opportunity …”” – News report, October 2021.  

I find this use of the adjective “rammed” everywhere nowadays. Here’s another example: from a recent Spectator “… we book a night at the Premier Inn next to Heathrow. We find it clad in scaffolding and the car park rammed.” 

In these examples, the word seems to mean “full to bursting”. I always thought that idea was expressed by the term “crammed”. How come the word has lost its initial letter? Dictionaries give us a subsidiary meaning for “ram” as a synonym for “cram”. 

The new uses have a rather different sense. They seem to imply that crowds of people have been forcibly compressed into the available space, with the connotation of violence: a paviour’s ram is a heavy mallet used for flattening paving stones onto a prepared flat surface. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives as a definition: “to beat down earth with a heavy implement so as to make it hard and firm”. This sense apparently excludes any possibility of a gradual filling-up of the space, the auditorium or the theatre by the steady arrival of more attenders.* And a ramrod is “a rod for cramming down a charge or cleaning a gun-barrel” (Chambers).

“Cram” has always meant, as Chambers gives it: “to stuff”, to “fill to superfluity”. It also means, of course, to overfeed oneself, or another, and there’s a further familiar use of the word: to cram for an examination of otherwise prepare oneself, perhaps in a hurry, in order to be ready to perform in front of an audience. 

So the two expressions have overlapping meanings, and that is a common way for sense to drift from one term to another. I am left wondering how that drift started, in the hands of which writer it first saw the light of print. What I can say is that the drift has happened very recently – say, in the last two or three decades. Now, as so often, everyone adopts the new meaning without even noticing the shift.  

One of the earlier uses of “cram” was in the context of stuffing food into the gullet of a bird – often a goose – in the preparation of foie gras. And that, of course, is an activity doomed to extinction, on account of the relatively new doctrine of animal rights. So social and gastronomic habits, even our feelings of compunction towards poultry, can usher in changes of meaning as well. 

Another phrase that’s already quite familiar is “jam-packed’”, which means more or less the same thing as “rammed” in its new sense, as exemplified in the specimens I’ve given here. Chambers defines the transitive verb “to jam” as “to press or squeeze tight”; also “to crowd full”, which is exactly what the new “ram” means. We surely have enough words to express this concept; do we really need another? My instinct is to point to journalists, who are constantly challenged to vary the ways they present everyday facts. And they are inevitably copied by others: if they enjoy any kind of power, it is, alas, only too evident in their use and abuse of English.

*‘Attenders’ will be a subject for comment on a future occasion.