887: lobby May 13, 2017

Like 'logistics' which originally was associated with buildings, the word 'lobby' originally denoted cloisters, coming from the Latin, 'lobium' meaning ‘covered walk’. For a while, this is all that the word meant, as it still would when referring to lobbies in buildings today. Later on however, the sense of 'lobby' as a verb meaning 'influence political official on an issue' arose from the practice of visiting the lobbies of the places where legislature was written in order to influence the members. The German 'Laube' is related, but the sense of somewhere covered here denotes trees and not man-made structures.