Month: September 2020
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Fumosity
Fumosity refers to the potential of a given food to induce flatulence. Currently, no standard of fumosity has been established, although one based on logarithms, like the Richter scale for earthquakes, would seem most appropriate. First used in the fifteenth century, the word derives from the Latin fumus, meaning smoke or steam. From the same…
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Fu yung
Fu yung, a sauce made of eggs and vegetables, was invented in the United States by Chinese immigrants; its name, which appeared in English in the early twentieth century, is Cantonese for lotus.
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Frumenty
Made by boiling wheat in milk and then seasoning it with sugar, cinnamon, and almonds, frumenty is a simple dessert invented by French peasants in the late fourteenth century and first referred to in English in the early fifteenth century. The dish derives its name from the Latinfrumentum, meaning grain. In turn, frumen turn—likefructus, the…
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Fridge
The peculiar thing about the word fridge is that it contains a d, while the word it stands for, refrigerator, does not. The original abbreviation of refrigerator was frig, a spelling used as early as 1926 and as recently as 1960. Beginning in the 1930s, however, the alternate form fridge started to appear, a spelling…
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Frankenfood
In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to allow American companies to market genetically modified foods. That decision prompted Paul Lewis, an English professor at Boston College, to write a letter to the New York Times in which he decried what he called Frankenfood, an innovation as misguided (in Lewis’ view) as Frankenstein’s…
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Frangipani
In the sixteenth century, the custom of the baissemain—that is, greeting a superior by kissing her hand—was still common in French aristocratic circles. For Muzio Frangipani, an Italian marquis living in Paris, the one drawback of this quaint custom was that the fingers of his French acquaintances did not smell as sweetly as they might.…
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Flummery
People who are not from Wales have great difficulty reproducing certain Welsh consonants; as a result, the Welsh word llymru was rendered into English not only as flummery but also as Mummery, the latter most easily said after a trip to the dentist. Flummery, of course, prevailed over Mummery and from the early seventeenth to…
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Flour
The poet John Keats died in the flower of his youth; Sir Lancelot was the flower of chivalry; Shakespeare’s plays are the flower of English drama. This use of flower to mean the blossom or best part of something is where flour—the best part of the grain after it has been milled and sifted—gets its…
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Fletcherize
“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate” was one of the catchy slogans invented by Horace Fletcher, a self-styled dietician who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convinced thousands of people to chew each mouthful of food thirty-two times, a number partly determined by most people having thirty-two teeth. This was not Fletcher’s…
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Flesh-monger
Before they were known as butchers, people who sold cuts of meat were called flesh-mongers, a term first recorded in the eleventh century. The monger part of this word, still current in terms such as fish-monger or war-monger, derives from the Latin mango, which is what the ancient Romans called someone who traded goods for…