Category: C

Job names, like teacher or farmer, usually arise almost as soon as their verb forms, teach or farm, come into existence. Other times the verb form may precede the appearance of the job name by centuries, as with weld and welder, because it takes that long for the job to be recognized as a valid…

In the eighteenth century, punch was sometimes referred to as contradiction, so called because its various ingredients contradicted one another: the rum, for instance, was opposed to the water, while the sugar was opposed to the lemon. Today we refer to such contradictory concoctions as sweet and sour, a phrase that also dates back to…

From an etymological point of view, a companion is anyone who shares a loaf of bread with you: the word derives from the Latin cum, meaning with or together, and the Latin panis, meaning bread. Companion entered English at the end of the thirteenth century, about the same time that the related form company was…

First produced at the end of the nineteenth century, Colby cheese takes its name from the city where it originated, Colby, Wisconsin. The city in turn, takes is name from the surname Colby, which derives from an Old English source meaning by the coal mine.  

Until about two hundred years ago, it was common for cookbooks to instruct aspiring chefs to pour their stewed beef or sliced apples into a coffin. By coffin, however, they did not mean a burial casket but rather a pastry crust or a pie tin. This culinary use of coffin is, in fact, the original…

Not surprisingly, the linguistic history of the word coffee parallels the trade route coffee followed as it was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. The French, Spanish, and Portuguese word for the beverage, cafe, the German kaffee, the Swedish and Danish kaffe, the Dutch koffie, and the Russian kophe all derive from the Italian…

Although a piece of cod is tasty, a codpiece is not, a surprising difference considering that these two cods derive from the same source. The word cod can be traced back a thousand years to the Old English codd, a word referring both to a sack in which items could be carried and to the…