Eating in the Romance languages
In Latin, short words having complicated irregularities in their forms gave way to simpler words with regular patterns and longer phonetic individualities.
Read MoreTag: phonetics
a Northern-English word: ‘mardy’
‘mardy’: ‘sulky’, ‘moody’—from ‘mard’, dialectal alteration of ‘marred’, meaning, of a child, ‘spoilt’, and the suffix ‘-y’, meaning ‘having the qualities of’
Read MoreWhy does ‘season’ mean both ‘a division of the year’ and ‘to flavour’?
‘to season’, from Old French ‘saisonner’: ‘to do something during the proper season’, hence ‘to make appropriate to the circumstances’, ‘to flavour (a dish)’
Read Morea Shakespearean phrase: ‘this mortal coil’
the troubles and activities of the world—literary or humorous, from Hamlet’s speech “to be or not be”—‘coil’: probably from Middle French ‘acueil’, encounter
Read Morethe making of ‘omelette’
1611—from French ‘omelette’, ultimately an alteration of ‘lemelle’, ‘knife blade’ (from Latin ‘lamella’), with reference to the flattened shape of the dish
Read Moreorigin of ‘Froggy’ (French)
mid-19th cent.—perhaps from a specific application of the general term of abuse ‘Frog’, aided by the shared initial consonant cluster in ‘French’ and ‘frog’
Read Moreto have someone’s guts for garters
The phrase ‘to have someone’s guts for garters’, used as a hyperbolical threat, is first recorded in the late 16th century.
Read Moreorigin of ‘neither fish nor fowl’
Origin: for purposes of fasting, food was divided into categories – ‘fish’, the flesh of fish, ‘flesh’, the flesh of land-animals, ‘fowl’, the flesh of birds.
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘the dog’s letter’
Named after Latin ‘canina litera’ (‘the canine letter’), ‘the dog’s letter’ is a name for the letter R, from its resemblance in sound to the snarl of a dog.
Read Moreorigin of ‘maudlin’
‘maudlin’: tearfully sentimental – from the Middle-English name ‘Maudelen’, designating Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus, customarily represented as weeping
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