Meet the raisins

sultanasraisinscurrants

We had Chelsea buns for tea yesterday. While discussing its ingredients (and its curious name), my American-raised daughter asked slightly suspiciously, “What’s a sultana?” Good question. Even though I know what it looks and tastes like, I realized I had no idea what it actually is, or what makes it different from a raisin. (And if you’re wondering what a Chelsea bun is, keep reading …)

The sultana is a “white” (pale green) variety of seedless grape, also called a sultanina, a Thompson Seedless (in the U.S.), a Lady de Coverly (in England), and a Kishmish (in Turkey and Palestine). The sultana grape is nicknamed the “three-way grape” since it’s used for table grapes, raisins and wine. Because of its multi-functionality, it’s the most planted grape in California. It’s thought to have originated from either Constantinople or from the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, from where the sultana raisin was originally and traditionally exported to the English-speaking world, some time in the 17th and 18th centuries. In some countries, namely Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, sultana is also the name of that particular type of raisin; in fact, in the UK, sultana usually refers to the dried fruit — which is basically a golden, plumper, rounder, more juicy version of the raisin (it’s treated with sulfur dioxide to maintain its color) — rather than to the variety of grape from which it’s made. However, in the U.S., raisin is a catch-all word for all dried grapes, making the word sultana unfamiliar to speakers of American English.

Another variety of raisin is the currant, made from the small, dried Black Corinth seedless grape, which is produced mainly in California and the Levant.* Currants — not to be confused with the berries called redcurrants or blackcurrants — are miniature raisins that are firm, dark in color and have a tart, tangy flavor; they are more often found in cooking and baking than their sweeter raisin cousins, which enjoy strutting their stuff as healthy snacks these days. The currant gets its name from Corinth, the port in Greece from which it originated.

For a comprehensive history of the raisin — and other dried fruits — check out the second chapter of Sun-maid’s rather delightful 100th anniversary book.

And back to the Chelsea bun: This classy-sounding treat is a type of currant bun — made of a rich yeast dough sweetened with brown sugar, cinnamon and spice mixtures, spread with butter, and rolled up with currants, lemon peel and dried fruits before being baked. (Americans: think cinnamon roll or cinnamon swirl, with less sugar and lots of raisins.) It was so named after the Bun House in Chelsea, a fashionable area of London, where the bun was first created in the 18th century. Favored and frequented by the British royalty of the time, the Bun House was demolished in 1839.

Are you now craving a Chelsea bun? Well, don’t fret: Fitzbillies, Cambridge’s oldest craft bakery and a veritable institution, is famous for its Chelsea buns and traditional cakes. And it ships all over the world. As it boasts on its website: “Our extra sticky Chelsea buns travel well – Sir Edmund Hillary took a box with him to Base Camp when he conquered Everest. They are packed in an airtight cellophane envelope and then into a stout corrugated mailing box. They should reach you in perfect condition for the final assault on the summit… or indeed your tea.”

Go scoff a Chelsea bun today.

* The Levant is “the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa”.

You say highway, I say freeway; you say crawfish, I say crayfish: Highway, freeway, crawfish, crayfish, let’s map the whole thing out …

howdyy'all

Do you drive on a highway or a freeway? Do you wear sneakers or tennis shoes? What do you call a sweet fizzy beverage? Can you distinguish – purely by ear – the words merry, Mary, and marry? And if your spouse announces that she’s got a job in “the city”, where do you think you’re going to end up living? Your answers will be determined mainly by where you live (in America, by the way), or where you grew up, and now you can see these regional dialect differences — in pronunciation and word usage — represented clearly and colorfully on maps of the U.S. thanks to Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, and to Dr. Bert Vaux of Cambridge University.

Let’s go back to the beginning of this century, when Dr. Vaux, then of Harvard University, spent five years collecting data on regional dialects throughout the U.S. using a survey he and his colleagues devised to distinguish differences in usage and pronunciation. Questions ranged from how you would pronounce “aunt”, “caught” and “caramel” to what you would call a long sandwich containing cold cuts. Do you say “y’all” or just “you”? “Soda” or “pop”? Vaux then mapped the data, using single color-coded points like pins on a map to show the geographical distribution of responses to the 122 questions he asked of more than 5300 participants.

Enter Joshua Katz, who decided for his end-of-the-year project to take Vaux’s data and create a series of interactive maps that gave a more complete and complex picture of these national dialect differences. Using a statistical algorithm that weighted the responses around a particular location, Katz was able to create mapped visualizations of Vaux’s survey; there’s even a drop-down menu that will show you the cities most and least similar in dialect to any point on the map you choose. Read Business Insider‘s report on Katz’s project. And the next time you’re offered a “car-ml” with only two syllables, you’ll know roughly what part of the country they come from …

 

Boys will be guys

guys

About half of my 20-year-old daughter’s many friends are of the male persuasion. Does she refer to them as men or boys when talking about them in the third person (ie. behind their backs)? The trouble is, they’re no longer boys, and to refer to them as such would be as demeaning as it would be inaccurate. But these youngsters with their lanky gaits and fresh-faced grins can’t really be called men either: they’re not yet blessed with the gravitas or the sheer male experience that would earn them that moniker. So where does that leave these young chaps, in terms of what we should call them? Curiously, it isn’t quite the same for girls teetering on the edge of womanhood: girl is generally acceptable — and can even be regarded as quite flattering — for a maiden long past her official passage into adulthood.

Boy officially means “a male child or youth”, according to the Oxford Dictionaries. In plural form it can refer informally to men who mix socially or who belong to a particular group, team, or profession: eg. “he wants to go out with the boys”. “Boy bands” are often just that: ensembles of pre-pubescents with more than just wet dreams who rarely make music together as men. And in days now fairly long gone, boy was sometimes used as an affectionate address for or to a man: “Let me advise you, my dear boy”, or “The old boy has seen better days”. But essentially, the word is reserved for those of pronounced youth or immaturity, before dropped voices and facial hair turn them into their official adult incarnations, ie. men.

In the US, we’ve found a solution for this ambiguous linguistic interregnum between boy and man: we call these youngsters guys. In fact, guy serves as a suitably vague catch-all to describe not just a male of indeterminate maturity or unspecified age, but also — especially in its plural form — a group of mixed genders and even ages; it’s not unusual to have girls or young women included in a group of guys (think the equivalent of the French pronoun for they — ils, which covers either men or men and women), although it is predominantly a male thing. A guy thing. Dude is also gaining ground — and not just in comic screenplays by Judd Apatow or in jocular boy-bonding-speak; that dude with the green hair can apply appropriately if informally to any guy of any age or persuasion.

Brits have an equivalent term, bloke, that’s often used to describe those gangly man-boys — and indeed any male past puberty, young or old. But unlike guy, bloke is male-specific: girls aren’t ever included in a gathering of blokes, however many pints they can knock back. Other British-English words — now for the most part outdated — for a man of any age are fellow and chap. Lad was a word that covered both boys and youthful males, but unless used poetically (or by a Scotsman), it’s more or less gone from our vernacular today.

Juvenile suggests criminality, and youth now carries derogatory if not downright criminal  overtones. So those fellows pictured above are probably happy that guys, blokes and dudes are firmly entrenched in our vocabulary, removing the need for us to choose between the men and the boys.

Dedicated to Jake, Flo’s favorite guy.

The Throne

throne

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote this poem, The Throne, for the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. The poem was read by actress Claire Skinner during a service at Westminster Abbey commemorating the anniversary. The last two lines of the poem echo the words spoken by the young Princess Elizabeth in a speech she made on her 21st birthday from South Africa.

THE THRONE

The crown translates a woman to a Queen –

endless gold, circling itself, an O like a well,

fathomless, for the years to drown in – history’s bride,

anointed, blessed, for a crowning. One head alone

can know its weight, on throne, in pageantry,

and feel it still, in private space, when it’s lifted:

not a hollow thing, but a measuring; no halo,

treasure, but a valuing; decades and duty. Time-gifted,

the crown is old light, journeying from skulls of kings

to living Queen.

Its jewels glow, virtues; loyalty’s ruby,

blood-deep; sapphire’s ice resilience; emerald evergreen;

the shy pearl, humility. My whole life, whether it be long

or short, devoted to your service. Not lightly worn.

A kiss is just a kiss, but “galocher” is to French kiss …

casablancakiss

Ils galochons. Yes, it’s official: a kiss is no longer just a kiss, at least not in the new French dictionary. The new edition of the Petit Robert — the French equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary — has a brand new verb with an age-old meaning: “galocher”, meaning “to kiss with tongues”. The French kiss finally has a French verb, marking the first time the French have a single word for one of their most famous verbal exports. It comes from the noun la galoche, the word for ice-skating boot — and yes, the new verb deliberately conjures the idea of sliding around on ice, a poetic evocation of the lovers’ kiss.

The term “French kiss” first entered the English language in the early 20s, reflecting the perception at the time of the French being more experienced and adventurous in the realm of sex and eroticism. The French words for the French kiss (as a noun rather than verb) are baiser amoureux (“lovers’ kiss”) or baiser avec la langue (“kiss with the tongue”), but baiser used as a verb has more vulgar connotations (think the French equivalent of the f word). Historically the French kiss itself was known as baiser florentin (“Florentine kiss”).

“Kiss” is from the Old English cyssan from the proto-Germanic kussijanan or kuss, which is probably onomatopoeic, based on the sound that kissing makes. The Four Vedic Sanskrit texts (1500 BC) contain the first mention of a kiss in writing.* The science of kissing is called philematology. Galochons involves the use of 34 muscles in the face.

Galochez someone today.

* Case, William. 1995. The Art of Kissing. 2nd ed. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin

Back to Blighty

Blighty

I’m going back to dear Old Blighty soon for my annual visit home. I always assumed (although I’m not sure why) that Blighty had something to do with the great Irish potato blight of the mid-19th century And being a British ex-pat, I’m someone who uses this affectionate term for my homeland frequently, without ever knowing where or how it originated. Then one of my American friends asked … Who knew that it actually comes from an Arabic word, by way of British India and the trenches of wartime France?

According to the OED, Blighty is British slang for Britain or England, or home. Used originally by soldiers during the First World War, it’s thought to have been uttered first on French battlefields some time in 1915. The word’s secondary meaning, which obviously developed out of the British soldiers’ yearning for their beloved Blighty, is “a wound securing return home” — ie. a wartime injury not mortal but sufficiently serious to merit being shipped back to Britain (and hence, sadly, often self-inflicted).

Blighty is a relic of British colonialism — specifically, British India: it derives from the Hindustani word vilayati  (pronounced “bil-AH-ti” in many Indian dialects and languages) meaning “foreign”, which in turn comes from the Arabic/Urdu word wilayat, meaning “kingdom”, “state”, “ministry” or “province”.

In their 1886 dictionary, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell explained how vilayati was adopted by the Anglo-Indians as a name for exotic foreign items, especially those brought to India by the British, such as the tomato (“vilayati baingan”, which translates as “foreign aubergine”) and soda-water (“vilayati pani”, or “foreign water”).

Fast forward about three decades, and Blighty was the British soldiers’ own corruption of the Anglo-Indian vilayati. Creeping into the vernacular of wartime England, it popped up regularly in songs — “There’s a ship that’s bound for Blighty”, “We wish we were in Blighty”, and “Take me back to dear old Blighty”, poetry, and other popular culture of the time. It endures today as an affectionate term used by British expats referring nostalgically to their homeland — now more commonly used with “Old” in front.

The Dead-Beat
He dropped, — – more sullenly than wearily,
Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,
And none of us could kick him to his feet;
Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;
— Didn’t appear to know a war was on,
Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.
“I’ll do ’em in,” he whined,
“If this hand’s spared,
I’ll murder them, I will.”

A low voice said,
“It’s Blighty, p’raps, he sees;
his pluck’s all gone,
Dreaming of all the valiant, that aren’t dead:
Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;
Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun
In some new home, improved materially.
It’s not these stiffs have crazed him;
nor the Hun.”

We sent him down at last, out of the way.
Unwounded; — – stout lad, too, before that strafe.
Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, “Not half!”

Next day I heard the Doc.’s well-whiskied laugh:
“That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!”

— Wilfred Owen

 

 

Reclaimed words

Quaker

On the Facebook page of my younger daughter, who has just turned 20, one of her female friends has written her a birthday greeting that won’t raise any eyebrows in that particular FB friendship group: “Love you, beautiful betch!” (with betch being an alternative form or spelling of bitch). It’s a word young women are now using commonly as an affectionate term for each other — but I wouldn’t recommend that you adopt that particular term of endearment if you’re male or an older female: it’s probably just not going to fly. That’s because it’s a relatively recent “reclaimed (or re-appropriated) word”: one that was previously a slur or insult aimed at a particular target group (in this case, women) that has then been deliberately adopted and reappropriated by that very group and turned into an acceptable or even positive word. And sometimes — either for a period after its reappropriation or indefinitely — this new usage is permissible only to the target group in question. Hence only young women are allowed to call each other betch. A couple of other reclaimed words that fall into this category of restricted use are queer (to be discussed in a separate dedicated Glossophilia post), and more recently and still quite controversially, dyke and nigga.

It’s not hard to understand why reclaimed words abound in areas of life in which prejudice, bias, conflict and divergent points of view are rife. As the changing rules of political correctness (as well as fads and fashions) govern and police the constantly updated terminology of sexuality and gender, politics, and ideological and religious movements, so the lingo bends and adapts, sometimes producing these insults-turned-titles-of-honor as a means of deflating or exploiting the verbal bullying: as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is a linguistic phenomenon that dates back centuries; there are reclaimed words in modern usage that many might be surprised to learn started out as terms of mockery or insult.

Mormons, Shakers and Quakers were all derogatory terms for members of their respective religious movements before they became their standard colloquial names. The 18th-century British evangelist John Wesley was originally mocked by his fellow students at Oxford University for preaching a prescriptive “methodist” approach to his religious lifestyle, but he adopted the term as the name of his movement, which would eventually secure its place as a denomination in the Anglican Church.

In the sex and gender world, the waters can get very muddy. Both queer and gay have evolved through complicated mazes of meaning and innuendo, with queer still finding its way in the world of definition, identity and acceptability (as are many of those who identify themselves as such, although ironically the word’s most modern meaning is that of deliberately eluding identification or definition in terms of one’s sexual or gender orientation). Gay is now established as an acceptable synonym for homosexual, although it had pejorative overtones in its infancy (in the context of sexuality). However, it has recently developed an additional and quite separate meaning — used predominantly among young people — of general and unspecified disparagement (“oh, his outfit is just so gay”), which is thought by many to be homophobic, even though this new meaning is supposed to be unrelated to that of the reclaimed word. Like queer, gay is being reclaimed and then “dis”-claimed  — batted back and forth across the net dividing PC from uncool. Dyke is another word in this area that might be in the process of being reclaimed, gaining ground in the gay community as a neutral word synonymous with lesbian, even though it is still considered insulting by most.

Tree-huggers, Tories and Yankees, all once terms of ridicule*, are now respectable nicknames used by self-respecting environmental activists, Conservative politicians and American citizens respectively — with barely a hint of irony. Nerds and geeks, who were social outcasts and the ultimate victims of bullying in their original incarnations, now wear their brains and smarts with fashionable pride, and often end up getting the girl. Even being a brat is something a few of us are happy to admit to, if we’re of the military or diplomatic variety.

* some would argue the third one still is, but that’s another (baseball) story …

Picnics and barbecues

Lemoynepicnic

François Lemoyne’s “Hunting Picnic” [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As the Memorial Day weekend approaches, Americans wipe the winter rust from their grills, stock up on steaks and dust off their picnic blankets, readying themselves for the alfresco dining event that opens the summer social calendar. And we ask ourselves that perennial question: just where do these two words describing festive outdoor meals come from? Curiously, one of them didn’t even have a hint of alfresco in its original meaning.

Contrary to various stories floating around the web in the last couple of decades, picnic has nothing to do with lynchings of African-Americans; indeed the word was born nowhere near American shores, but originated in France. And in true French tradition, it started out being all about wine, not food. Pique-nique was first seen in Tony Willis’s Origines de la Langue Française of 1692, and it described a group of people dining in a restaurant who brought their own wine. (Yes: the French invented the concept of BYOB.) In fact, the whole idea of the picnic began not as a pastoral alfresco dining experience, as we think of it now, but rather as a meal to which each individual contributed, no matter what the context or the setting — like a precursor of the modern potluck dinner. When it first appeared in English usage — which, according to the OED, was in one of Lord Chesterfield’s letters in 1748 (although it was not in common use until after 1800), the word picnic was associated with card playing, drinking and conversation; for some picnics of the early 19th century century, guests would contribute entertainment rather than food items, and so it began English life as a fashionable social occasion, rather than a meal as such. The concept of a picnic being an outdoor repast first evolved from the rather indulgent rest breaks with refreshments taken during hunts in the 18th century, as illustrated in Lemoyne’s painting pictured above. The original word piquenique is possibly from the French verb piquer, meaning “to pick or peck”, paired with the rhyming word nique, meaning “something of little importance or worth”, which has German origins. However, the OED is altogether doubtful about piquenique‘s provenance.  

Barbecue is an even older word, dating back to the mid 17th century and a different part of the world: the Spanish Americas. With an etymology much simpler and straightforward than that of its alfresco cousin described above, it comes from the Arawakan word barbakoa describing the raised framework of sticks on which the Indians would cure meat, and slowly over the course of the early 18th century it came to refer more specifically to “an outdoor meal of roasted meat or fish as a social entertainment” (from the Online Etymology Dictionary).

barbecue

Happy Memorial Day!

 

 

Fabrication – something made of metal or lies?

 

fabrication

If you do a Google image-search on the word fabrication, you’ll most likely see metal, sparks, and men in masks. But if someone says the word fabrication to you, your brain-image search will probably yield a different crop of results, involving tales, untruths, or the most recent lying so-and-so you’ve encountered. Those fabrications are just harder to capture in jpeg form.

Recently talking to my friend Lynn, I noticed that she talked of “fabricating” this structure or that it was more expensive to “fabricate” that design. Why didn’t she just say “make”?, I asked. It’s because she works in the world of architecture, where fabrication doesn’t necessarily mean a pack of lies. It’s probably fair to say that the most common form of fabrication is of a story or tale, but its most innocent, prosaic and historical form is of the metal (or now digital) variety, especially in an architectural setting. How strange that we should dismiss anything known to us to be fabricated, and yet we might jump at the chance of acquiring something pre-fabricated.

According to the OED, fabricate is a transitive verb meaning 1) to construct or manufacture, esp. from prepared components; 2) to invent or concoct (a story, evidence, etc.); or 3) to forge (a document). The word dates back to the mid-15th century, when it meant simply “to fashion, make, or build,” from the Latin fabricatus or fabricare, a verb with the same definition. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it took a few centuries for the verb to acquire a new and more sinister meaning — with its mendacious use being recorded in print in the second part of the 18th century.

How did a word that had (and still has) such a sturdy, no-nonsense meaning in its literal sense come to acquire the deceit inherent in its figurative sense? I’m afraid I don’t have the answer, but I would be very curious to know if there are any theories or answers to this question.