Back in the fourteenth century, you did not refer to the teeth marks you left in your brother’s leg as a bite but rather as a snack: the word bite, in fact, did not come to be used as a noun until the fifteenth century. Snack, on the other hand, meant animal bite when it first appeared in English but gradually lost this literal meaning as it came to signify various kinds of metaphorical bites. In the mid sixteenth century, for example, it came to denote a verbal retort, as in, “Her witty snack made him blush”; even now we describe such retorts as “biting,” and we might even refer to their effect as having “taken a piece out of him.” The next shift in the meaning of snack occurred in the late seventeenth century when it came to signify a small “bit” of something, especially of liquor (a close relative of snack, the German schnapps, became the actual name of a liquor, one that English adopted in the early nineteenth century). Finally, in the mid eighteenth century, snack acquired the sense now most familiar to us, a morsel of food; here too the original bite sense of snack lingers in the background, since a snack is the same thing as a bite to eat. In origin, snack probably developed from the Middle English snatchen, which became the Modern English snatch. The ultimate source of snatchen is not known, but it is probably the same source that gave rise to snap, a word unlike snatch and snack in that it has never strayed far from its original sense of bite.<\/p>\n
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Back in the fourteenth century, you did not refer to the teeth marks you left in your brother’s leg as a bite but rather as a snack: the word bite, in fact, did not come to be used as a noun until the fifteenth century. Snack, on the other hand, meant animal bite when it […]<\/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-41112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n