You're probably going to be seeing quite a few concepts out of this book over time... at the moment I'm reading Martha Barnette's Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies, which is about the origins of food words. It's a browsing sort of book... not the sort of thing that's easy to read at one go (because no matter how interesting, it still gets a bit repetitive after awhile), but nice for picking up for an odd 5-10 minutes when you're looking for something to fill time. The drawback to reading a food book, of course, is that one feels compelled to *cook* things. Last night, for example, I made Spaghetti Caruso, named for guess-who.
Anyway, Barnette makes some delightful linguistic side-jaunts at times, and one of them is what I wanted to share: the word boudoir (which she mentions because ladyfingers are also known in England as boudoir biscuits) has an amusing etymology. The word means "a lady's private sitting room or bedroom." It's the sort of word one associates with Regency romances and bodice-rippers, yes? A voluptuous sort of word. Well, that's not quite how it started. It's derived from the Old French word bouder, meaning "to sulk" (is this how we got "boo-hoo"?... oh. That's interesting. Boohoo is another word for a sailfish. For that matter, so is woohoo. Maybe one is what you use for the one you caught, and the other is the one that got away? :-D). So anyway, back to my original point... I'm deeply amused that the original meaning of "boudoir" was "a private room for sulking." Those tempermental French, eh?
And for another amusing word origin from the same source... you're familiar with the avocado, yes? You probably know that it also goes by the name "alligator pear" because, well, it's sort of pear-shaped, but the rough, dark-green "hide" is reminiscent of an alligator's, right? Well, that's not what it reminded the Aztecs of. The Aztecs called it ahuacatl, which is their word for "testicle," and the Spanish lifted the word entire and took a stab at spelling it in Spanish. (For that matter, the Spanish spelling is the same as the original Spanish word for "lawyer"-- I wonder what THAT implies?)
And guacamole? Same source, actually, for all that it sounds like such a different word. The Aztec word is ahuacamolli-- ahuacatl + molli, sauce (the same word that shows up as mole, a spicy sauce in Mexican and South American cooking). The Spanish spelling of that jaw-breaker turned into "guacamole." Voila.
Posted by gris at July 18, 2004 06:45 PM