Best Actress in a supporting gown

This Sunday is the Academy Awards. Who will be best actor/actress? Which film will be the best picture? Who cares? We know what people are really interested in: the gowns.

In Late Latin, the word gunna meant "fur", and by the 8th century this word was being used to mean a fur garment that elderly or sick monks were allowed to wear over their habits (it being pretty darn nippy getting up in the middle of the night in those chilly monasteries to sing one of the offices of the day). This was borrowed into Old French as goune, a word that has completely died out in French but survived in English after being borrowed in the 1300s. Originally it meant any flowing garment worn by either sex. This has survived in the scholar's gown worn as part of academic dress. Until the 18th century, "gown" was the ordinary name for a woman's garment, but it was then superseded by "dress", leaving "gown" to be used only for fancy dresses.

If you're interested in movies, check out this great film blog: http://roomoverthegarage.wordpress.com/

Copyright Katherine Barber 2012

Holy crêpe

Today is Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known as Pancake Day from the tradition of eating pancakes to use up the remaining eggs before the beginning of Lent. A perfect time to look at the word "crêpe". Both "crêpe" and "crisp" come from the same Latin word, crispus. But before you leap to the conclusion that this is because crêpes are crispy around the edges, I have to tell you that it is a lot more convoluted (and interesting!) than that.

Back in Latin, crispus meant "curly-haired". Surprisingly, this word was borrowed into English very early, back in Anglo-Saxon times when English did not borrow heavily from Latin except for church terms. Intriguing. Why did the Anglo-Saxons need to borrow this word? Perhaps Anglo-Saxon hair didn't have the curly gene whereas Italian hair did? Whatever the reason, the word had been borrowed before 900, when Bede described someone as having "crisp locks".

Meanwhile, the French had also inherited crispus  from Latin but turned it into cresp. They also used it of hair, but also of other wavy things, and by 1285 they were using it of thin pancakes, not because they were crispy around the edges but because they were wrinkly around the edges (crêpe has never had in French the "crunchy" sense that "crisp" has in English). The French carried on eating cresps -- which became crêpe when the the s fell out of the word (memorialized only by that circumflex) -- while the more literally-minded English ate the culinarily identical "pancakes" for several centuries.

Auguste Escoffier of the Savoy Hotel, late Victorian and Edwardian England's version of a celebrity chef,  introduced the English to crêpes Suzette. 
No doubt Mrs Patmore would have served them to the Crawleys at the Downton Abbey dinner table. Drenched in a boozy orange sauce, these were the only crêpes the English knew about until the crêpe craze of the 1970s made crêpes ubiquitous as an all purpose wrapping for all kinds of fillings.

Halibut

Next Wednesday, February 22nd, marks the beginning of Lent, a time when many people eat fish rather than meat for religious reasons. This practice is at the origin of the word “halibut”. Various kinds of flatfish were called “butt” in the Middle Ages, possibly because their heads had a blunt shape like the butt end of something. At the time, the word “holy” was pronounced HALLY or HOLLY. A “hally butt” was, therefore, a flatfish eaten on holy days, a “holy flatfish”.
Holy flatfish, Batman!

Downton Abbey floozies

An interesting article about linguistic anachronisms in Downton Abbey. Click here.

Passion fruit or passion killers?

If you are planning on serving your sweetheart passion fruit this coming Valentine's Day as being particularly appropriate, you might want to think again. When the word “passion” first came into English from a Latin word meaning “suffering”, it was used in particular for the sufferings of Jesus (as it indeed still is). Only later did the sense of “affliction” morph into “extreme love”, which can, alas, be an affliction. But the original meaning survives in the passion fruit. It is the fruit of the passion flower, which was called that because its parts, people thought, recalled Christ's crucifixion: the blossoms look like the crown of thorns, the styles like nails, and the leaves and tendrils like scourges.

Kind of cuts your appetite, doesn't it? Chocolate is safer! (And for more on that, visit this post.)

Pool

Have you got your fingers crossed that you'll win your office Super Bowl pool this Sunday? You may be thinking that this type of pool is the same as the one you swim in (after all, it's like a big container that stuff is put in), but in fact it's a totally different word. The gambling pool comes from the French word poule (chicken). One of its slang meanings was "plunder" -- images of soldiers carting off chickens after sacking a village spring to mind. This came to mean the collective stakes in a card game that the winner takes like the victor's spoils of war. Then all kinds of groupings came to be known as “pools”: for gambling, as in office pools, and not for gambling, as in car pools, although sometimes those might be a gamble, depending on the drivers involved!

Happy Birthday, Franz!

January 31 is Franz Schubert's birthday, so what better day for a music-themed post.
The word "music" itself comes ultimately from the Muses, the ancient Greek goddesses of the arts who hung out with the über arts god, Apollo. This came into English via Latin and French, which meant the word wasn't available to the Anglo-Saxons. Their word for "music" was gliw, which has given us the word "glee". Already by the 1200s, "glee" was being used as a synonym for "mirth", but, for all you avid fans of that TV show, Glee does not mean "happiness" in this context. "Glees" were a specific type of part song in the 1600s, and "glee clubs" grew up in the early 1800s. All the same, I find it quite delightful that a word meaning "music" ended up meaning "happiness".

To make you gleeful, and as a homage to Schubert, please enjoy this amazing ballet, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, set to the final movement of his Great C Major Symphony, choreographed by William Forsythe, full of high-energy virtuosity and featuring the world's coolest tutus. Performed here by Claire-Marie Osta, Delphine Baey, Eleonora Abbagnato, Hervé Moreau and Nicolas Noel of the Paris Opera Ballet (if you like ballet, check out my other blog, www.toursenlair.blogspot.com).