Bagels, Bumf, and Buses by Simon Horobin

Author:Simon Horobin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192568281
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Vegetables

The asparagus takes its name from the Greek word asparagos; despite this simple relationship, the word’s history is rather more complicated. The Greek word entered English via the medieval Latin form sparagus, which was subsequently anglicized into the more recognizable form sparrow-grass. Sparrow-grass was used until the nineteenth century, when it came to be considered an ignorant mistake and was replaced by asparagus. Also of classical origin is the cauliflower—ultimately from Latin caulis ‘cabbage’, which is also the source of kale. The word entered English via the French chou fleuri ‘flowered cabbage’; other historical spellings, such as collyflower, show the partial anglicization having been taken further still.

The cucumber is straightforwardly a version of the Latin word for the same vegetable—cucumis; the English spelling with a ‘b’ reflects the influence of the medieval French form cocombre (compare modern French concombre). The Greek word for the cucumber, angourion, is the ultimate source of the English word for the related gherkin—which was borrowed into English from the Dutch word augurkje. As with the word ghost (Old English gast), the ‘h’ in gherkin is a later addition—the word was originally spelled without, as in Pepys’s reference of 1661: ‘We . . . opened the glass of Girkins . . . which are rare things.’ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the pronunciation of cucumber as ‘cow-cumber’ became popular, and the word began to be spelled cowcumber accordingly. In the nineteenth century, this pronunciation fell out of fashion and became associated with other non-standard markers (such as aitch-dropping) as evidence of illiteracy, as in Charles Dickens’s portrayal of Mrs Gamp’s speech in Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–4): ‘In case there should be such a thing as a cowcumber in the ’ouse, will you be so kind as bring it, for I’m rather partial to ’em, and they does a world of good in a sick room.’ The view that cucumbers are good for your health dates back to Roman times; according to Pliny, the emperor Tiberius was advised to partake of a daily cucumber by his physicians—apparently a cucumber a day kept the doctor away. But not everyone has been persuaded by the vegetable’s health benefits. Dr Johnson approvingly cited the view of English physicians that ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing’. Despite his enthusiasm for gherkins, Pepys would no doubt have concurred; an entry in his diary for 22 August 1663 records the demise of one Mr Newburne, who apparently died from eating ‘cowcumbers’.

Salad, now used to describe a mixture of raw vegetables, was probably originally a dressing using salt, since the word derives from Latin sal ‘salt’. A salt-cellar was formerly a saler; it was altered to cellar on the assumption that it was related to the word meaning ‘storehouse for provisions’, to which the word salt was added. The result is a rather tautologous (Greek tautologos ‘repeating what has been said’) formation, meaning ‘salt salt-cellar’. The traditional placement of a salt cellar at the centre of the dining

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