Month: September 2020
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Milk
In 1818, Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of “the slows,” a disease caused by contaminated milk; four years later, Louis Pasteur was born, a French chemist who invented pasteurization, a process that made milk much safer to drink. As a result of pasteurization, milk ceased, in the nineteenth century, to be treated with suspicion and instead…
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Mezzaluna
This crescent-shaped chopping knife takes its name from the Italian mezza luna, meaning half-moon. The Italian mezza—or its masculine counterpart, mezzo—are more familiar as musical terms as in mezzo soprano (a voice halfway between a soprano and a contralto) and mezza orchestra (a musical composition requiring only half the orchestra). Luna derives from the same…
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Mess
As a culinary term, the word mess persists only in biblical usage, as in the “mess of potage” for which Esau sold his birthright, and in military usage, as in mess hall. The word originally referred simply to a portion of food, enough to fill one’s belly, and derived ultimately from the Latin word mittere,…
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Menu
From the Latin word minuere, meaning to lessen, a whole family of English words has developed: in addition to menu they include diminish, minute, minor, minus, mince, minuet, and even, through a misunderstanding, minnow. The Latin adjective minutus, meaning small, was formed from minuere, and it was this word that directly gave rise to minute—meaning…
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Mensa
In 1962, a group of smart people, tired of each other’s company, decided to form a club for people with IQs above 148 so that they could meet other smart people of whom they were not yet tired. Certain that the name Smart People’s Club would alienate the general public (whom they feared) they chose…
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Melon
Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century author of The Three Musketeers, so loved melons that he offered to give all his published manuscripts to the French municipality of Cavaillon in exchange for supplying him with twelve melons a year for the rest of his life. This love of the melon was perhaps shared by the Greeks, who…
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Melba toast
Not one, but two, dishes have been named after the turn-of-the-century opera diva, Dame Nellie Melba. The first dish to acquire her name, Melba toast, dates back to 1897 when Melba stopped in at the London’s Savoy Hotel and ordered several slices of toast which, by mistake, were served to her without butter; Melba so…
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Meat
The essential difference between the words meat and flesh is that we eat the former and are the latter; in other words, although the two words denote more or less the same thing, we prefer to think of the pork chop on our plate as meat, not flesh, and we prefer to think of ourselves…
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Mealie-mealie
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch settlers in what is now South Africa borrowed the Portuguese word milje—meaning millet, a kind of grain—and from it formed the word mielie, which they first bestowed upon the grain known in North America as corn and later bestowed upon a cake made from this corn. Eventually,…
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Meal
The meal in three course meal and the meal in oatmeal have no linguistic connection to each other. Like the word meat, the meal that refers to breakfast, lunch, and dinner derives ultimately from an Indo-European source meaning measure. Because people have long eaten at appointed or “measured” times—such as noon—this ancient word for measure…