Month: September 2020

The province of India known as Punjab derives its name from two Persian words, panj, meaning five, and ab, meaning water, a name that alludes to the five tributaries of the Indus river that flow though that territory: the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej. Likewise, the beverage named punch, first…

Although it might be mistaken for a derisive insult aimed at men, the term pudding-prick actually refers to a thin skewer once used to fasten shut a bag of pudding before dropping it into boiling water to cook. This sense of puddingprick arose in the early sixteenth century, almost a hundred years before the word…

English is a hungry language: it grabs words from a buffet of other languages, and snarfs them down whole, rarely bothering to make that borrowed word jive with whatever spelling system English supposedly has. The result is a kind of orthographic indigestion. The language ends up being full of words with needless bits, better known…

All soups—whether chicken or vegetable, vichyssoise or gazpacho, alphabet or mulligatawny—owe their existence to that first and original soup, the primordial soup that once bubbled over the steaming earth (recently, however, a breakaway faction of maverick scientists has argued that the primordial soup was in fact a primordial broth; French bio-chemists, on the other hand,…

Whereas the ancient Aztecs referred to the avocado as ahuacatl, meaning testicle, many North Americans call a cooked calf’s testicle an oyster, more specifically a prairie oyster. For the Aztecs the connection between avocado and testicle was probably based upon shape, although the Aztecs themselves might claim that size was another factor; for us, the…

Poutine must be distinguished from its look-alikes. First, there is poteen, which denotes whiskey brewed by moonshiners in Ireland; that word comes from the Irish poitin, meaning little pot. Then there is putain, a French word meaning prostitute, which entered English as poontang. Next there is Vladimir Putin, the dapper President of Russia. Finally, there…

Throughout the eighteenth century, in some parts of England, a man was allowed to vote in the parliamentary elections so long as he was the head of his own household, and not simply a member of another man’s household. Householder eligibility was determined in turn by whether the man had his own fireplace where he…

Although it is now the name of a fragrant mixture of flower petals used to perfume a room or a closet, potpourri was originally a dish of many meats stewed together but then removed and served separately. The name of this dish is French for rotten pot, the French pourri deriving from the same Latin…