In the sixteenth century, life on board a ship beetling across the Atlantic Ocean was rather dreary: extracurricular activities were limited to rum, sodomy, and the lash, and illness was prevalent due to poor food, close quarters, and tossing waves. Sick sailors were often fed loblolly, a thick gruel whose peculiar name might seem reminiscent of the gurgling sounds emitted by a seasick stomach. In fact, however, loblolly is probably a compound formed from lob, a Yorkshire word meaning to bubble up, and lolly, another dialect word meaning broth\u2014lolly-banger, for example, was a cant name for a ship’s cook. Loblolly’s status as a quasi-medical remedy is affirmed by the fact that the assistant to a ship’s surgeon was called a loblolly boy. The word also acquired other senses, most of which are pejorative. For example, in the early seventeenth century, it became synonymous with boor and bumpkin, probably because it, like them, was thick and dense. In the nineteenth century, it came to be used in the U.S. as a name for a mudhole. Somewhat similar to loblolly is lobscouse, also a sailor’s dish, though made with meat and biscuits; it seems, though, that the two words are not related. Lobscouse probably derives from a Northern European language, perhaps the German labskaus or the Danish skipperlabskovs. The word was sometimes abbreviated to just scouse, which eventually became a name for a citizen of Liverpool, probably because of that city’s reputation as an important seaport.<\/p>\n
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In the sixteenth century, life on board a ship beetling across the Atlantic Ocean was rather dreary: extracurricular activities were limited to rum, sodomy, and the lash, and illness was prevalent due to poor food, close quarters, and tossing waves. Sick sailors were often fed loblolly, a thick gruel whose peculiar name might seem reminiscent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-l"],"yoast_head":"\n