Category: B

The bowl you eat cereal from every morning takes its name from the same source as the words ball, balloon, and ballot. All four of these words derive from a Germanic source meaning to swell. This sense is still very evident in balloon and ball, items originally made by inflating animal skins, and is still…

During the first half of the fifteenth century, dozens of names of dishes emerged in English only to fall into disuse and obsolescence a few decades later. Many of these dishes had names whose origins are now inscrutable, either because they were in use so briefly that no one bothered to take note of where…

Although the word bottle now refers to vessels made of glass, it originally denoted a narrow-necked vessel made of any material, especially leather. The word bottle, which English borrowed from French in the late fourteenth century as hotel, takes its origin from the Late Latin word buticula, meaning small vessel. In turn, buticula was formed…

Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth century work, The Faerie Queene, is the longestnarrative poem in English: more than 26,000 lines. In the early 1990s, I studied The Faerie Queene for eight hours a day, five days a week, for three years. By the time I completed my PhD dissertation, I knew every nook and cranny of every…

Because the English have ruled or tried to rule Ireland since Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541, the names of numerous Irish foods have made their way into English. One of the earliest of these Irish adoptions was bonny-clabber, a dish of sour, clotted milk whose name derives from the Irish words…

Dating back to the seventeenth century, the word used to describe a substance prone to bursting into flames, such as kerosene, was inflammable, the prefix in actually being used to intensify the word flammable. Usually, however, the prefix in is used to negate the word it precedes, just as incapable means not capable. This linguistic…

Although English has borrowed tens of thousands of words and phrases from other languages, other languages have also borrowed tens of thousands of words and phrases from English. The English phrase bowl of punch, for example, was borrowed in the seventeenth century by at least two other cultures: the French, who corrupted it to bollepunge,…

As a culinary term, board is now used only in compounds and phrases such as cupboard, pastry board, and sideboard. Throughout the thirteenth century, however, board was among the most common of kitchen words because it referred to the flat, raised surface upon which meals were eaten; in other words, board meant table. The importance…