Tag archives: food and drink
Braggadocious? Never. Just excited about the Oxford Dictionaries February 2013 update!
“Having a mare of a week? With hump day over, the weekend is in sight and it’s time to start thinking about getting blootered on appletinis! Or do you prefer to put on your schlumpy clothes and curl up with a tray bake? My tortie has a more tweetable Friday night than that. But you [...]
From lamingtons to sandwiches: looking at eponymous foods
For some, Anna Pavlova is considered one of the greatest ballet dancers in history. For others, her legacy lives on in the form of the dessert she inspired. We celebrate her birthday on 31 January (by the Old Style of dating; her actual birthday according to the Gregorian calendar would be 12 February), and in [...]
Word stories: ‘rum’
The word rum is first recorded in 1654 in the Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, where it is mentioned along with another of its names kill-devil: Berbados Liquors, commonly called Rum, Kill Deuill, or the like. The word itself is of obscure origin, being somehow related to rumbullion and rumbustion, words whose origins [...]
Grab your bezzie and get ready for deets of the ODO November 2012 update!
If you’re as twitterpated by dictionaries as we are, you’ll want to be the first to hear about some of the words going into Oxford Dictionaries Online this quarter. Whatever they may be, they certainly aren’t hacky – and you might even find them useful in some situations, for example. . . With the boyf [...]
On culinary vocabulary
We tend to take the names of the things we put in our mouths for granted. But once in a while we may do a double take. At bang-bang chicken, for example: why on earth is it called that? Who dreamed up such outlandish terms as death by chocolate and pigs in blankets? Where did [...]
The language of cooking: from ‘Forme of Cury’ to ‘Pukka Tucker’
The earliest surviving English-language recipes came from the kitchens of kings and their great nobles. Richard II’s Master Cooks boasted that their Forme of Cury contained only the ‘best and royallest viand of all Christian Kings’, and, what’s more, had been approved by the king’s physicians and philosophers. Healthy eating issues and celebrity endorsements are [...]
Why does English have so many terms for being drunk?
There are many hundreds of words and phrases for being drunk, not just in modern times, but also throughout the history of slang. A study by one of today’s leading chroniclers of slang, Jonathon Green, of half a millennium’s worth of collected material—amounting to almost 100,000 words and phrases—shows the extent to which the same [...]
Wake up and smell ODO’s latest additions!
There is very little that thrills the heart of a lexicographer quite so much as the smell of new words. Fresh, piquant, and uncluttered by the barnacle-like clichés that attach themselves to so many words which have been around for hundreds of years, these recent additions to the language breathe fresh life into it, and [...]
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