Month: September 2020
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Pimiento
As Classical Latin, the language of ancient Rome, evolved into Medieval Latin, the language of Europe’s scholars during the Middle Ages, it changed in both pronunciation and vocabulary. For example, in Classical Latin the word pigmentum meant paint, and it was with this meaning that English adopted the word as pigment near the end of…
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Pig-iron
A pig-iron is an iron plate suspended between a fire and the meat cooking over it to prevent the meat from burning. This plate acquired the name pig-iron in the mid eighteenth century, but the term itself goes back to the mid seventeenth century when pig-iron referred to an iron ingot—that is, an iron lump—of…
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Pigeon’s milk
Whereas most humans regurgitate their food only when they are in gastroin-testinal distress (for example, as the result of stomach flu, salmonella, or a dinner of kahlua and pickled eggs), some animals vomit up their stomach contents in order to provide nourishment for their young. Pigeons do this, or at least they regurgitate the epithelial…
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Pig
As far as most people are concerned, pig, hog, boar, sow, and swine are different words for the same porky animal; however, to those versed in the niceties of the sty, hog denotes a castrated pig, boar denotes an uncastrated pig, sow denotes a female pig, and swine denotes any piglike creature, whether wild or…
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Piece de resistance
Today, almost any excellent thing can be a piece de resistance, whether the context is art, architecture, fashion, or literature. Originally, however, this French phrase applied only to the chief dish in a multi-course meal, the one that, along with the roast, defined the third course of the dinner. The phrase literally means piece of…
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Pie
From the mid thirteenth to the early seventeenth century, the bird now known as the magpie was simply called the pie. English borrowed this ornithological name, pie, from the French, who derived it from the Latin name for the bird, pica, which in turn developed from an Indo-European source meaning pointed, as is the bird’s…
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Piccalilli
The name of this pickle, made by preserving minced vegetables in mustard and vinegar sauce, seems to have originated in India in the mid eighteenth century when the British East India Company gained control of the nation. The word, however, does not originate from Hindi or any of India’s 180 other languages but rather is…
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Pettitoe
A cooked pig’s foot is called a pettitoe, a word English acquired from French more than four hundred years ago. Originally, however, the term pettitoe referred not to the foot of a pig but to the innards of a goose, a peculiar shift in meaning that occurred partly because the English people misapprehended a French…
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Perogie
Just down the street from where I live, in a neighborhood that was settled by eastern Europeans in the first two decades of the twentieth century, is Ann’s Perogey Palace, an establishment that every day sells hundreds of small dumplings filled with cheese and potato, which customers take home and fry with lots of onions.…
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Pepper
The green, red, and bell peppers you grow in your garden are not really peppers; they acquired their name by mistake when Columbus, who came upon them in the Caribbean islands, assumed them to be a variety of the real pepper plant, the one that gives us peppercorns. The real pepper plant, which is actually…