Month: September 2020
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Strawberry
In the Middle Ages, women stopped eating strawberries while they were pregnant because they feared that the berry would cause their child to be born with red birthmarks; a blemish still known as a strawberry mark. The word strawberry, however, is as innocuous as it sounds, deriving simply from straw—the hollow, dried stems of certain…
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Stein
When beer is gulped from a stein, what the drinker holds in his hand is, from an etymological point of view, a stone, or at least an earthenware mug that is stonelike in its weight and texture. This German word for stone was adopted by English as a synonym for beer mug in the mid…
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Steak
Although tigers may not seem to have anything in common with steaks, they do: tigers and steaks derive their names from a single, Indo-European source, one that also evolved into the words stick and stigma. This Indo-European source—pronounced something like stei and meaning to pierce—evolved into the Old Persian tighri, meaning piercing weapon or arrow,…
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Squash
The squash that means edible gourd is a completely different word than the squash that means painful racquet sport. Squash, the sport, gets its name from the small, hollow ball being squashed into a little disk each time it hits a wall of the court or a shoulder blade of an opponent. In turn, the…
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Square meal
The term square meal, denoting a satisfying, hearty meal, dates back to at least the late nineteenth century and probably arose from the association of square with right a square’s angles are right angles, so if something is square it is right, and things that are done right—like a meal—are usually satisfying. In the early…
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Spumante
The sparkling wine called spumante takes its name from the Italian spuma, meaning foam, as does the ice-cream dessert known as spumoni. Both words appeared in the early twentieth century, although the related word spume has been used since the fifteenth century to describe froth that results from beating an egg.
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Spotted dick
Although you might expect spotted dick—a kind of suet pudding—to have been given its name by a man prone to whimsy or hypochondria, the name of the dish actually has a very sober origin. Since the early nineteenth century, dick referred to a cheese made in Suffolk, one of England’s many counties; the name of…
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Spoil pudding
The term spoil pudding refers not to a pudding, but to a person, or rather a parson, one whose sermons are so long mat the congregation’s Sunday puddings are left too long in the oven, thus spoiling them. The term appeared in the late eighteenth century.
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Spinach
The spinach plant is native to Persia, but because it was introduced to most of Europe from Spain (where it had been brought by Arabs), it was sometimes referred to by sixteenth-century scholars as Hispanicum holus, Latin for Spanish herb. It is tempting to assume that the first part of this Latin name—Hispanicum—was simply corrupted…
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Spikenard
Spikenard (also known as Indian Root, Life-of-Man, and American Spikenard. Spikenard is a bitter extract obtained from the plant of the same name; in ancient and medieval times, spikenard was commonly used to flavour sauces and meat dishes, but fell out of favour as new spices were introduced from the Far East. The plant’s name…