Month: September 2020
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Raspberry
Until the early seventeenth century, the raspberry was known simply as raspis, a word of unknown origin that suddenly appeared in English in the early sixteenth century. Before this time, the raspberry was known as the hindberry, so called because it was thought to be eaten in the wild by hinds, or what we now…
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Rasher
Thin slices of bacon or ham have been known as rashers for over four hundred years. In the seventeenth century, one early philologist proposed that their name arose from the fact that they are often made in a hurry: you “rashly” throw the slices of meat into the frying pan, taking little care to ensure…
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Raisin
From racemus, a Latin word meaning a cluster of grapes, French derived the word raisin, meaning a single grape. English adopted this French word in the fourteenth century, first using it as a synonym for grape (which had been adopted a hundred years earlier) and then shifting its application to a special kind of grape,…
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Radish
The colour of the radish—reddish—is not where this hot root takes its name; rather, it derives, through Italian and then French, from the Latin word radix, meaning root. Other words that derive from the same source include eradicate, meaning to uproot, and radical, which originally denoted a person championing a return to the “grassroots” of…
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Rabbit
Just as there were no rabbits in Australia until they were taken there by British settlers in 1859, there were no rabbits in England or in northern Europe till they were introduced from southern Europe in the twelfth century. Accordingly, most of the languages of northern Europe—including English, Celtic, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Finnish—had to…
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Quince
The quince, a relative of the apple and pear but too bitter to be eaten uncooked, derives its name from Cydonia, a port on the coast of Crete now known as Khania. Because the fruit was exported from Cydonia, the ancient Greeks called it melon Kudonion, meaning Cydonian apple. This name entered Latin as cydoneum,…
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Quignon
To my chagrin, using the term bread-bum to refer to the end-slice of a loaf of bread is not appropriate at most formal dinner parties. Fortunately, another word exists for this crusty and much sought after part of the loaf: quignon. This useful word derives through French from the Latin cuneolus, meaning little coin, the…
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Quesadilla
In Spanish, the word queso means cheese, and the endings ilia and illo are suffixes used to form the feminine or masculine diminutives of a word, just as French and English often use the diminutive ette, as in kitchenette. Thus, quesadilla, the name of a turnover filled with cheese, means little cheese. The ilia diminutive…
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Pythagorean
The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who gave his name to the Pythagorean theorum, also believed in the transmigration of souls from one creature to another; in other words, before you were born your soul might have been incarnated in Charles Dickens, and after you die, it might end up in a goat or a gnat.…
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Puttanesca
The Italian name of this pasta sauce means in the style of a whore. The immediate Italian source for this culinary term is puttana, meaning whore, which in turn derives from the Latin putida, meaning stinking. This origin may help explain why anyone would give such a name to a food: when it’s cooking, the…