A smell-feast is a what a freeloader was called centuries ago. Someone who snuck into the wedding party or funeral of a stranger in order to nibble the cold cuts, all the while pretending to congratulate the groom or console the widow, was a smell-feast. In an early eighteenth-century play called The Invader of His Country, a waiter catches just such a rascal in mid bite: “Heyday, who have we here? One of those creatures whom they call a hanger-on, a sponger, or smellfeast. Pray, how far have you nosed this supper in the wind?” It’s interesting that the waiter employs two terms in addition to smell-feast\u2014namely, hanger-on and sponger\u2014and he could have used many others. In fact, over the centuries, dozens of synonyms for smell-feast have come and gone. One of the earliest, from the fourteenth century, is papelard, which was formed from the Italian pappare, meaning to eat, and lardo, meaning fat. In the fifteenth century lickdish appeared, followed in the sixteenth century by an explosion of freeloader terms: scambler, scaffer, francher, parasite, waiter at table, cake fumbler, fawn-guest, and lick-spigot. Most of these are self-explanatory, but a few require comment. Francher, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, arose as an onomatopoeic word like crunch, but it seems to me that a connection to the medieval Latin francus, meaning free, is more feasible. Parasite was adopted from Latin, and literally means beside-feeder, that is, someone who sits next to you and eats your food, but doesn’t pay; parasite didn’t develop its more specialized biological usage until the early eighteenth century. Lick-spigot denoted a specialized freeloader, one who hung around in taverns watching for dripping ale-spigots or abandoned glasses that still held a mouthful of liquor. In the seventeenth century appeared tub-hunter, lick-spittle, and haunt-dole, the latter of which might be rendered into present-day English as grub-loiterer. The nineteenth century saw tag-tail and sponger, while freeloader appeared in the mid twentieth century. Related terms have also appeared over the centuries. For example, the idiom to lick the trencher emerged in the early seventeenth century to describe the act of surreptitiously eating off someone else’s dirty plate, or trencher. As well, in the late sixteenth century the word shadow developed a new sense, one that might come in handy nowadays: an uninvited companion of an invited dinner guest is a shadow.<\/p>\n
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A smell-feast is a what a freeloader was called centuries ago. Someone who snuck into the wedding party or funeral of a stranger in order to nibble the cold cuts, all the while pretending to congratulate the groom or console the widow, was a smell-feast. In an early eighteenth-century play called The Invader of His […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n