When Francois Mitterand, the former president of France, realized that he would soon die of prostate cancer, he engaged in a stupendous act of abligurition; that is, he squandered a small fortune on a lavish and bizarre meal for himself and thirty friends. The meal included oysters, foie gras, and caviar, but the piece-de-resistance was roast ortolan, a tiny songbird that is actually illegal to consume in France. Traditionally, the two-ounce warbler is eaten whole, bones and all, while the diner leans forward over the table with a large napkin draped over his head. The napkin, according to food lore, serves two functions: it traps and concentrates the aroma of the petite dish, and it conceals the shameful exhorbitance of the meal—the abliguration—from the eyes of God. In origin, the word abliguration derives from the Latin preposition ab, meaning away, and the verb ligurire, meaning to eat delicately. Even further back, ligurire evolved from lingere, meaning to lick, which is also connected to cunnilingus and linguine. As for the ortolan, the tasty object of Mitterand’s abliguration, its name means gardener in Provencal, and it derives from the Latin hortus, meaning garden. This means that ortolan is related to words such as horticulture and orchard. The Indo-European ancestor of the Latin hortus was a word pronounced something like gher, meaning enclosure, which is also the source of garden, yard, kindergarten, and even girdle.