This week, after a couple of typical columns on oddball vocab, “Weird Words” once again takes up the related field of etymology; that is, where words come from, what they used to mean and how they acquired their current definitions.
Here are eight terms related to food or eating, all with an origin that’s unusual — or at least interesting!
Biscuit – This employs the traditional Latin bi(s), signifying two or twice (as in bicycle and bicentennial, etc.). Biscuit literally means twice-cooked — which naturally raises questions about Nabisco’s popular Triscuits.
It may surprise you to learn that these latter goodies have been around since 1903; company records don’t clarify whether the name refers to this treat’s three key ingredients (wheat, oil & salt), or to the company’s original insistence that they were made with electricity.
And while we’re at it: Nabisco is a shortening of National Biscuit Company — kinda like Necco Wafers, named for the New England Candy Company. The latter, incidentally, are now a whopping 177 years old!
Buccaneer – This, of course, is an alternate and somewhat more appealing word for pirate, a profession not nearly as romantic as it now sounds. In olden times, one of the roughest things about piracy was the onboard food — especially meat, which had a tendency to go bad fast. Baked goods weren’t much better, as they were often rock-hard and bone-dry from overcooking for durability.
Piracy took a huge leap forward when seafaring thieves learned how to smoke their meat for better preservation — a process acquired from Caribbean natives, who called their grill a buccan or boucan. This allowed for longer voyages and more successful raids by the “boucaneers” — though I doubt anyone foresaw it would produce such a talented football team. (Sorry, Eagles fans.)
Frisbee – You might wonder what this is doing among other food-related terms — unless you remember that it’s shaped like a dish. Or, more properly, a pie tin.
Early in the last century, Mrs. Frisbie’s Pies was a popular bakery in Bridgeport, CT. Students at nearby Middlebury College were fond of her products, including the tins — which proved curiously aerodynamic, making for great on-campus recreation.
The term was eventually trademarked by California’s Wham-O Corporation, with the spelling changed to avoid a lawsuit. Wham-O is therefore the only firm that can use this name; others must call it something like “flying disc” — which just ain’t as cool.
Frisbee joins a select group of registered trademarks that have somehow become common nouns, even though they’re technically owned by their inventors and should be capitalized. This group includes: Band-Aids (Johnson & Johnson), Kleenex (Kimberly-Clark), Vaseline (Unilever) and, more surprisingly, Realtor (National Association of Realtors). Laundromat and Dumpster were once trademarks as well — the latter from the slogan “Dempster-Dumpster,” used by a pioneering garbage-truck firm in Knoxville, TN.
Grocer – Distantly related to the term gross — in the sense of something large, entire or whole (i.e., gross ignorance, gross domestic product); naturally, this is because grocers offer a vast array of products. The very old French word from which it came had a broad range of meanings that included thick, coarse, rude or common — and thus it did eventually give us the other adjectival meaning of gross.
Here’s hoping that does not describe the place you buy your foodstuffs.
Ketchup – Though the actual origin is somewhat disputed, this is now generally agreed to proceed from the Chinese kichap, meaning fish sauce — or the brine in which fish is sometimes stored.
The similarly popular condiment relish is, incidentally, simply an adaptation of the verb that means to enjoy — because it makes food taste better (especially hot dogs!).
Polecat – This weasel relative is named not for its long, thin, pole-like shape, but rather for what it often steals from farmyards to eat — namely, poultry.
Pomegranate – Related to our word grain and to the French pomme (apple), this somewhat surprisingly also gave us the word grenade — not only because they resemble each other, but also in the way both contain tiny pieces (i.e., seeds in one case, and shrapnel in the other). Personally speaking, as far as pomegranates go — I’d just as soon eat the grenade.
Along the same lines, the French term for a potato is pomme de terre. Using the Latin terr ( = earth, as in terrain, terra firma and many others), it literally means apple of the earth.
Just make sure you brush off the dirt!
(The author acknowledges a heavy debt here to the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary.)
