Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Fare
Once an everyday term, the word fare, meaning food provided by a host, now seems relegated to a few old-fashioned phrases such as bill of fare and daily fare; anyone who now uses the word on its own—as in “My dear fellow, what fare do you offer today?”—instantly declares himself to be someone we will…
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Farctate
When you are so full that you can eat no more, you are farctate. Like the word farce, farctate derives from the Latin farcire, meaning to stuff.
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Farce
Farce is a seasoned mixture of chopped ingredients that chefs stuff into other things—things like chickens, fish, or even ravioli. Farce is also known as stuffing, dressing, or forcemeat. Etymologists once believed that farce was a corruption of the word force in forcemeat, but in fact the opposite is true: farce comes from the Latin…
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Fanny adams
One of the paradoxes of human nature is that we are capable of mocking the death of someone we probably would have risked our own life to save. In 1867, an eight-year-old child named Fanny Adams was murdered and dismembered in England. Members of the distinguished Royal Navy, perhaps distanced from the tragedy by the…
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Falafel
The Middle Eastern dish known as falafel is made by deep-frying balls of ground chickpeas and hot pepper, and then serving them in a pita with tahini sauce. Its name, introduced to English in the 1950s, derives from the Arabic word for hot pepper—filfil—a word that may represent the sound a person makes after biting…
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Fajita
One of the things that distinguishes a fajita from a fascist is the habit of the one to sit on your plate, aromatic and steaming, and of the other to goose-step past the Fuhrer. Despite such differences, the two words are ultimately related to one another: both derive from an Indo-European source that meant bundle.…
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Faggot
When the word faggot appeared in English in the fourteenth century, it simply meant bundle, specifically a bundle of sticks or twigs tied together for kindling. This original sense lies behind most of the later senses of faggot, including a culinary one: in British kitchens, a faggot is a little ball of minced pork, liver,…
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Expresso
The reticent nature of our ancestors is attested to by the fact that express—the action of putting feelings into words—literally means to press out, as if our forefathers revealed their emotions only when hard-pressed to do so. (Long before it became the name of a device for publishing the news, the press was an instrument…
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Ewer
Pronounced like the first two syllables in the sentence “You were early,” a ewer is a large water-jug used for washing hands before eating a meal. The word appeared in English in the early fourteenth century, and literally means waterer, deriving from the French eau, meaning water. In turn, the French word eau developed directly…
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Eskimo pie
At present there are dozens of different brands of a frozen treat made by placing a slab of ice cream between two wafers of chocolate. The original such confection appeared in Iowa in 1920, and its inventer—a candy-store owner named Christian K. Nelson—dubbed it the I-Scream Bar. One year later, this name was changed to…
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