Kickshaws are tidbits of food like the cashews, cookies, and mints scattered in bowls around your grandparents’ home. However, the original meaning of kickshaw was slightly different: from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, it was a disparaging name for a dish that seemed needlessly fancy or suspiciously exotic. British food, according to the British, was hearty and substantial and put hair on your chest, but those frothy, cloying foreign foods were something else. This distaste for “something else” is, in fact, reflected in the word kickshaw itself, which is simply a corruption of the French quelque chose, meaning something. A similar corruption of another word led to the appearance of sunket, another name for a tidbit of food or a dainty: sunket derives from the word somewhat, formerly used as a synonym for something as in, “Give me somewhat to eat.” The change in pronunciation from somewhat to sunket probably occurred in Scotland, where the wh of many words becomes so aspirated that it almost sounds like a qu or a fc; after undergoing this Scottish change in pronunciation, sunket entered, or rather reentered, English at the beginning of the eighteenth century.