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English words with a food-related origin

Alex

By Alex
in Food Traditions & Culture

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Alex

Alex

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I always look forward to reading my emails from A.Word.A.Day. Each week's words follow a theme; this week it was "words related to food" -- i.e., English words with a food-related origin that have taken on an additional meaning or meanings. These were the five for this week's mailings:

jambalaya

farraginous

kool-aid

ragout

immolate

 

Of course, there are many more than just those. "Oleaginous," "toast/toasted," and "treacly" were the first to come to my mind. Got any others?

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"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

A king can stand people's fighting, but he can't last long if people start thinking. -Will Rogers, humorist

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Lisa Shock

Lisa Shock

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IIRC, 'lady' is from Saxon laf-dian or loaf-carrier. -The lady of the house was in charge of the bread and/or dough.

 

Precocious and apricot are from the same root word in greek, praecox that means early flowering.

 

Salary comes from sal, the roman latin word for salt as roman soldiers were often paid in salt, which was a valuable commodity.

 

And from two foods into one, sausage is a portmanteau word for sow & sage.

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liuzhou

liuzhou

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On 20/08/2016 at 7:38 AM, Lisa Shock said:

IIRC, 'lady' is from Saxon laf-dian or loaf-carrier. -The lady of the house was in charge of the bread and/or dough.

 

And from two foods into one, sausage is a portmanteau word for sow & sage.

 

Nearly right on "lady". It comes from Old English hláf meaning "bread", loaf + the root dg meaning "to knead", so "loaf-kneader" rather than "loaf-carrier".

 

I'm afraid the sow + sage is an amusing but nonsensical folk etymology. There is zero evidence for such an origin.  "Sausage" comes ultimately from Latin and meant "salted" or "preserved by salting".

 

About 30 years ago, a colleague and I looked into this with the vague idea of writing a paper about it. We gave up when we realised just how many words are derived from foods and how food terms have taken on figurative meanings which have become naturalised. Also to be considered are the number of words where the meaning has changed.

Take "meat", for example. Originally it just meant "food", but then narrowed to mean "the flesh of animals as food" then just "the flesh of animals". Then it widened again to include things like the flesh of nuts. Then it could mean "a meal". And many more meanings.

 

Not to mention the many figurative uses of "meat" such as the sexual sense of "meat market".

 

"Fruit" is also linguistically complex.

 

Interestingly, the same thing happens in unrelated languages such as Chinese.

Anyway my contribution for now is "carnival". From Latin via Italian - "carne" meaning "meat" and levāre "leaving". So, it originally referred to the act of leaving out meat at Lent, then transferred to the associated festive activities.

Edited by liuzhou
typo (log)
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Alex

Alex

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A.Word.A.Day did the same thing a few years ago, which included one of my favorite words, salmagundi. I seem to remember a classical music radio show with that title, in which the host played selections from all eras and genres.

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

A king can stand people's fighting, but he can't last long if people start thinking. -Will Rogers, humorist

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liuzhou

liuzhou

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You might want to think about "melody" which has connections to the Latin for "honey".

 

Perhaps more surprising is "satire" which is also, indirectly via Spanish, from Latin and "is alleged to have been used for a dish containing various kinds of fruit, and for food composed of many different ingredients."  - OED

Edited by liuzhou (log)
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...your dancing child with his Chinese suit.

 

"No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot"
Mark Twain
 

The Kitchen Scale Manifesto

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