What came first, the turkey or the yam?
Most
Americans will join family members this week to express their gratitude for one
another & for something near & dear to my heart – food. In celebration
of Thanksgiving, Wordmonger takes a look at the origins of some of the words
that might fit in the sentence, “Uncle Ambrose, would you please pass the
______?”
The
word turkey
showed up in English in the 1540s & originally applied to the guinea fowl
of Madagascar (which Brits mistakenly believed came from Turkey). The turkeys on
many Americans’ tables today are another bird altogether, a species first
domesticated by the Aztecs. Spanish conquistadors met their first new world turkeys
in 1523, and brought them back to Europe & northern Africa. Within fifty
years, those new world turkeys had become the main course
of choice for most British Christmas dinners.
Potato entered English in the 1560s form the Spanish patata. The Spanish had borrowed
the word from the people of Haiti, who called their native sweet potato batata.
By 1565 voyagers returned from Peru with a similar, yet much paler tuber and it
became established in Ireland as a food source. By 1590, the name potato
was applied to it as well. Oddly, this interloper was referred to both
as the Virginia potato (another example
of geographic confusion), or the bastard potato (because it wasn’t nearly as
important at the time as the sweet potato). Though the sweet potato still reigns today in many third world
countries, that white-fleshed tuber first found in Peru reigns supreme in the
first world.
In
the 1580s, yam made its way into English through Spanish (igname)
or Portuguese (inhame) from a West African language, where nyami
simply meant to eat.
In
the 1530s, the term stuffing was born, meaning a
seasoned mixture used to stuff fowls before cooking. Its synonym, dressing
was used as a verb as early as the 1300s to mean to prepare for cooking. It
came from the OId French word drecier, to raise, hoist, arrange or set a table. By the 1500s, dressing
joined stuffing to mean a
seasoned mixture used to stuff fowls before cooking.
And
what would all this food be without family to appreciate it? The word family
entered English in the early 1400s, meaning servants
of a household. The English borrowed it from the Latin term familia,
which meant family servants or the
servants of a household. In the 1500s family began to mean those who lived under one roof, including parents, children, servants,
lodgers & boarders. By the 1580s, family came to mean those claiming descent from a common ancestor.
It wasn’t until the 1660s that the word family began to mean persons closely related by blood.
Dear
readers, I challenge you to publically declare your word-nerdliness by offering
an etymological comment at your family celebration. You might discover that
your dear Great Aunt Boadicea shares your fascination for word history (or if
not yours, at least mine).
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