Faux Etymologies about Food
People
can be as creative with their stories about the origins of words that describe
food as they can with various ways to prepare food. Here are just a few
examples.
Because
asparagus
has also been called sparrow-grass, the false notion has
arisen that sparrows used to loiter in the asparagus bed, thus the name. Actually,
the word came to English in the 1500s from Greek (asparagos), & within
the next two centuries it was eclipsed in popular usage by two colloquialisms sparrow-grass
& sparagrass. During this whole time, botanists held onto the
original word. Darned if those botanists didn’t win out in the end, when
Victorian England’s fascination for properness found sparrow-grass to be unpleasantly common-sounding,
& so asparagus was reborn. Interestingly, some die-hard British
cookbook authors continue to refer to asparagus as grass.
Marmalade’s true ancestry starts in Greece, where a melimelon was the fruit
that occurred when an apple was grafted onto a quince tree. The term translates
to honey apple. Melimelon made its way
through Portuguese and French to become marmalade in English, referring to preserves made from boiling fruit(s).
Even though the term entered English in 1524, nearly 20 years before Mary Queen
of Scots’ birth, some insist that the word marmalade was born as servants
scuttled about trying to answer the ill Queen Mary’s demands for fruit
preserves, whispering to one another, Marie malade (Mary sick).
Word
had it back in the 1970s that gorp (a mixture of peanuts, raisins, dried fruits and such) stood for Good Old
Raisins & Peanuts. I remember hearing this explanation myself while schlepping
along some trail dwarfed by my CampTrails backpack. Etymologists refer to this
sort of invention as a backronym. In fact, gorp
probably comes from some collection of gulp, gorge, gobble &/or
gorge. There’s also the possibility that it came about as a
back-formation of gorper, which was an American term used in the 1950s meaning glutton or gulper.
The
name artichoke
has inspired many a tale of choking caused by undercooked artichokes.
These stories make some sense; after all, who came up with the idea that we
could boil a thistle for 40 minutes & then eat it? In fact, the word artichoke entered English in the 1500s from the
Italian term articiocco. The Italians got the word from Arabic, & simply
couldn’t pronounce al-harshuf well enough for it to look or sound much like its
former self.
Which
of these faux etymologies had you previously heard? Please leave a comment.
My thanks go out to this week’s
sources: Hugh Rawson’s Devious
Derivations, OED, Etymonline, & Wordnik
All of these were new to me, and very entertaining! Marmalade indeed.
ReplyDeleteThese are so fun! I had not heard the story of "Marie malade". Now of course I will always have to call it that.
ReplyDeleteIn present day Italian, the word for artichoke is "carciofo," so it sounds as if they gave up trying to pronounce that Arabic word altogether.
Hi Rachel6 & Anne,
ReplyDeleteMay none of your Maries experience malade! Thanks so much for coming by so regularly.
All new to me. I've never even heard of gorp. talking about artichokes brings up one the things that most intrigues me about food. Someone, at some time, had to look at an artichoke and say, "That looks like it could be tasty." Really?
ReplyDeleteHi Christine - I'm with you on artichokes (which I happen to love). On top of all that, the artichokes we eat today have been hybridized for centuries, making them more & more edible (& edible looking). The thing someone decided to try eating hundreds of years ago probably looked more like your garden-variety thistle. I'm guessing s/he was very very hungry.
ReplyDeleteI will never eat asparagus again without thinking of sparrow-grass. Thanks.
ReplyDelete