Graftor

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who engages in corruption for personal gain ; a device or tool used to insert a graft into a plant or body ; someone skilled in joining or transplanting living tissue or plant material
2. One who profits from dishonest practices ; an apparatus designed to facilitate grafting in horticulture or surgery ; a practitioner who specializes in uniting separate biological elements
3. An individual involved in illicit enrichment through bribery or fraud ; a mechanism that aids in the attachment of grafts for medical or botanical purposes ; a technician adept at performing grafting procedures

Etymology: Graft traces back to a writing tool. Its ancestor is Latin "graphium," a stylus, borrowed from Greek "graphion," from "graphein," to write. Through Old French "greffe," it reached English as "graff," used for a shoot inserted into a plant. The sharpened cutting probably resembled a stylus. The verb came from the noun, and "graftor" follows a common English pattern: the suffix "-or" turns a verb into a word for the person or device that performs the action. So a graftor is anyone, or any tool, that grafts. The corrupt sense of graft, meaning dishonest gain from a position of trust, is a separate American development. Its link to the horticultural sense is probably metaphorical, since a grafted shoot draws nourishment from a host plant. The noun now covers both the gardener and the official, though only the first has a stylus in its ancestry.

Synonyms: grafting agent, scion, budder