Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Carnival
Although the word carnival is now used in a general sense to mean festival or even circus, the word originally had a much more precise application: it referred specifically to the holiday before Lent when Roman Catholics made merry and feasted, activities not permitted once the forty days of Lent began. To remind people that…
-
Carling
In the sixteenth century, the Sunday preceding Easter Friday became known as Care Sunday, the word care being used to mean sorrow or grief. Because this Sunday was a part of Lent, certain foods—including meat—were proscribed, while others—such as parched peas—became traditional fare. The parching of the peas may have been intended to represent a…
-
Carbonara
Diamonds, graphite, and coal are all made of carbon, an element whose name derives from the Latin carbo, meaning coal. The Italian word for coal, carbone, also derives from the Latin carbo, as does carbonara, a word that might be loosely translated as in the manner of the charcoal pit. Centuries ago, Italians gave the…
-
Caraway
When a word is successively passed from one language to another, it not only may end up with a very different spelling and pronunciation, it may even refer to a different item than it originally did. For example, the Latin word for onion—caepa—became the English word chive, the name of a plant related to, but…
-
Caramel
When heated until it melts and browns, sugar is called caramel, a word that literally means honey-cane: in Medieval Latin, the sugar cane plant was called cannamella, a word formed by combining canna, meaning cane, and mel, meaning honey. Cannamella then evolved into Spanish as caramelo, where it became the name of a browned sugar…
-
Cappuccino
Served with a foamy head of milk, the dark coffee known as cappuccino takes its name from an order of friars known as the Capuchins. The beverage is so called either because its foamy head resembles the partly-sheared heads of the Capuchins or because a Brazilian order of Capuchins specialized in growing coffee beans in…
-
Cantaloupe
The two common names for this orange-fleshed melon, cantaloupe and musk melon, derive respectively from the most divine and most earthly of sources. When introduced to Italy from Armenia in the seventeenth century this fruit was cultivated at the Pope’s country villa, a place near Rome called Cantalupo to which His Holiness would occasionally withdraw.…
-
Cannibal
When Columbus first visited the West Indies he encountered a nation of people who called themselves the Galibi, a name meaning brave people. Because the pronunciation of Galibi varied slightly from dialect to dialect, European explorers sometimes heard the name pronounced as Carib and sometimes as Caniba, prompting different words to arise from each variant.…
-
Cannelloni
The slender tubes of pastry stuffed with seasoned meat or even with cream and chocolate take their name, cannelloni, from the Italian canna, meaning reed or stalk, a tube through which a plant’s nutrients flow. In turn, the Italian canna goes back to a Latin source (also spelt canna), that developed via French into words…
-
Candy
The word candy emerged in English in the early fifteenth century, a few decades before the appearance of sweetmeat, another word that refers to a wide variety of sugary morsels. Candy and sweetmeat were originally distinguished in so far as candy tended to refer only to flavoured pieces of crystallized sugar, while sweetmeat could also…
Got any book recommendations?