Apron

Ruffled apron.

Apron is found in English writing in 1307 as naperonns, a reflection of its French origins as naperon, a diminutive form of nape “table cloth”, which comes from the Latin mappa “table-napkin”.

First off, this means that apron and napkin come from the same place.

Napkin-folding instructions from Mrs Beeton’s Family Cookery Book (1923)

English takes naperon from French as a word for “the article of dress” used to “protect clothes from dirt or injury” and then, a few decades later, takes nape “cloth for table” from French (again) and adds the Dutch suffix –kin “small” to get napkin (or, what were apparently competing synonyms at the time, napet or napella).

Second, it means that somewhere along the way, English speakers made a shift from a napron to an apron.

“a napron” or “an apron” – it’s a spontaneous reanalysis of the article-word boundary. Or it just keeps your clothes clean.

You can use apron as an adjective.  As in apron-child (a child old enough to stand if holding on to mom’s apron), apron-string (what no one wants to let go of, c.f. apron-child) and apron-husband (not quite what you think, instead apron-husband refers to a man that “meddles with his wife’s business”).

This is what you get when you google “apron man”. Well, this and a lot of pornographic kitchen-wear.

A more recent term for ‘apron’ is pinafore, which comes from the combination of to pin the verb and afore “in front”.   This term surfaces in writing in the late 1700s, along with its siblings, pinbefore and pincloth.  All of these refer to the same kind of apron – one which ties around the waist, but has an upper square that is pinned onto the shirt to hold it up.  Pinafores were associated especially with young children, both boys and girls, worn to protect their clothes.

A pinafore.

Alas, “pinbefore” and “pincloth” are now considered obsolete –  as are pins.  Pinafores today (?!) are, like the one pictured above, pin-less (probably wise when the covering is used in combination with small children).

From the 1850s on, we also see the use of pinny as a shortened form of pinafore.

My question: if a pinafore looks this nice, what do you wear over it to keep it clean?

When you have a traditional apron that ties at the waist, the top half of an apron is referred to as the bib, which can be pinned, looped, or tied behind the neck. The word bib probably comes from the verb bib “to drink” (a lot), which we see in words like imbibe. These days, we are most likely to see a bib on a baby.  Or a lobster-crawfish-ribs eater.

A half-apron at work (in a 1920s cookbook).

Meet the 1950s hostess apron. A wee bit less functional and a wee bit transparent.

You can, of course, have a half-apron (also referred to in the 1950s as a hostess apron or cocktail apron) whose function is primarily to indicate that it was in fact the wearer that prepared the food (probably while wearing a full apron made of non-transparent material).

The smock. (The 1970s were a hard, hard time. But we kept clean.)

The oldest word in English for ‘apron’ is actually smock, which appears to be related to Old English smuggan “to creep” (likened to Old Norse smjuga “to creep into, put on, a garment”).  A smock can be more like a dress than a covering, as it can be full-length with sleeves (which apparently must be put on slowly).

The word smock first appears in English writing around 1000, but at that time referred to a “woman’s undergarment; a shift or chemise”.   Smock goes over clothes in the 1800s as part of the phrase smock-frock “loose-fitting garment of coarse linen or the like”, which was a garment worn by farm-laborers “over or instead of a coat”. The smock-frock keeps its shape, loses the –frock, and gains wider popularity in the 1930s, as a covering for artists and gardeners.

Yeah, birds don’t put mine on either.

So, cover up in the kitchen, keep your clothes olive-oil-splatter free.  Wear an apron.  And use cloth napkins while you’re at it.

Bungalow

Bungalow comes to us from Hindustani bangala, a word that began as an adjective “belonging to Bengal” that described and later became the name for a style of home found in rural India and used as waystations by British travellers in India during the mid 19^th c.  These bungalows were light structures, informal and temporary, built low to the ground with sizable porches covered by low-handing eaves.

A bungalow in India

The first couple of times we see it in English writing, bungalow appears in accounts of living in or traveling to India: from an 1809 journal, we have, “We came to a small bungalo, or garden-house” and in a descriptive passage from 1806, “The bungalows in India…are, for the most part…built of unbaked bricks and covered with thatch, having in the centre a hall…the whole being encompassed by an open verandah”.

Almost 100 years later, bungalow appears in an issue of The Architect and Contract Reporter, which states simply, “The buildings have been designed in a bungalow type”. In America, the term bungalow is taken up by residential architects in California to describe small, one-story homes that have an informal feel, characterized by a multipurpose floor plan with an open living/dining room area.

Typical bungalow floorplan

The bungalow craze lasted from 1905 to 1930 and spread west to east as the appeal of the plan caught on – the bungalow had a “first home” aura which made it perfect for newlyweds and younger homebuyers.  The bungalow was not necessarily place to settle down for good; it was (still) temporary, a step in a direction (much like the “starter home” of today).

Many of the Sears & Roebuck homes sold during the first decades of the 20th century were of the bungalow style, like “The Argyle”.

The important aspect of the bungalow, the one that signals some serious cultural change, is the blending of public and private spaces – no longer was there a separate room (like a parlor) for entertaining –  everyone was welcome in the family room – and parts of the house that had once been cordoned off (like the kitchen) were now in view of visitors and dinner guests.

American two-story bungalow – which looks just like the house my grandparents used to live in.

A google search for “craftsman bungalow” results in a flood of images of houses that all look like the house my grandparents lived in when I was little.  But with tiny variations.  It’s the same house, presented in a myriad of different building materials (brick, shingle siding, clapboard siding) and colors (gray, brown, red, orange), all with the same wide-stepped front porch and low eaves, the same windows and brick chimney.

The rooms were set so that we could run our multi-leafed Thanksgiving dinner table from the dining area to the living room – the only way to make space for all of us.  A benefit of multipurpose-ness.

The house I live in now has no architectural dividers between the dining area, living area and kitchen. The bungalow laid the foundation for this kind of open-concept plan, laying the foundation for the living spaces that were to come.

Snack

Hungry for a snack?

Snack started its etymological life as a verb (“to snack”) which possibly (though doubtfully) originated from the Middle Dutch snacken (which sounds like I made it up, but I didn’t).  The original sense of snack (and snacken) was “a snap, a bite, especially that of a dog” and we see it used this way in English writing between 1400 and 1900.

I think he wants a doggie snacken.

So, right off the bat we have in fact three terms that follow the same sort of trajectory – snack, snap, and bite – moving from dog mouths to people mouths, and to people mouths both in the sense of words (you can make “biting” remarks and be accussed of “snapping” at someone) and in the sense of food (snack, snap, and bite are all terms found for “food eaten in between meals” within the Linguistic Atlas data).

I get rather snappish when I am in need of a bite.

The idea behind the transition of snack “to bite” and snack “a bite” is that of being a “small quantity”, a “mere taste” of food or drink.  A morsel, a tidbit, a “light or incidental repast” (no amount of joking could be better than what the OED actually says).

Some repasts seem less “incidental” than others. Some just make you feel like an inadequate mom (snack-wise, at least).

An example of early written snack (from the British publication The Monitor, 1757): “When once a man has got a snack of their trenchers, he too often retains a hankering after the honey-pot”.  I’m pretty sure my mom gave me this same warning when I started dating…

Anyway, another, more old-fashioned, word for “a snack” is actually lunch.  The earliest use of the word lunch was to denote the “sound made by the fall of a soft heavy body” (read: “the sound of too much snacking”); lunch in this sense might be onomatopoeic.

A “snack tray” for kids that would take me longer to make than dinner.

Lunch may have developed from lump (like hunch from hump and bunch from bump, perhaps in a box and perhaps with a fox).

Lunch takes on a more familiar meaning in the late 1500s, as “a piece, a thick piece; a hunch or hunk”. The word was used as an abbreviation of luncheon, was initially considered “vulgar” and, according to an 1829 quotation, lunch was “avoided as unsuitable to the polished society there exhibited”.

Really?

So, which came first, lunch or luncheon?

Dunno.  Luncheon shows up first in writing (11 years before lunch). It could be that lunch hops over to the food-side of things due to the influence of Spanish lonja “slice of ham”.  It could be that luncheon came from lunch (like truncheon from trunch and puncheon from punch, perhaps in a boat and perhaps with a goat).

Apparently we do a lot of stuff by analogy.

But back to snacks.

This is what I give my kids.

Other words for a snack?  How about a piece, a piece meal, or a piecing?

Homemade goldfish crackers? Are you kidding me?

How about a nuncheon? (Noon + our suffix friend from before, cheon).

Would you care for a nosh, a snatch, a knick knack, a tidbit? How about a morsel (and we get the following from 1655 A Voyage to India, “The Shark. . .will make a morsell of any thing he can catch, master, and devour”).

Take that, overachieving-snack- making-mommies! You’re making the rest of us pre-made-snack- serving-moms look bad.

Maybe, if you did prepare a fancy snack (and you know who you are), then you should call it a refection (related to refectory, from the Latin verb “to refresh”), a mixtum, a bever (yes, it’s related), a collation (so is this), a crib (if you’re an Aussie or a Kiwi), a munchin, or a merenda (if your snack is Italian).

Or a bait.  Which went from “attractive morsel of food placed on a hook or in a trap to allure fish or other animals to seize it and be thereby captured” to use as “food generally” or “refreshment” between 1470 and 1650 or so.

Snacks: attractive morsels of food placed on a plate in order to allure children or other animals to seize it and be thereby captured. Or just placated.

The last tidbit of snacky information I’d like to leave you with is another morsel of Linguistic Atlas data.  How about a jackbite?

Jackbite is a term used in West Virginia along the Kanawha River, a term that harkens back to the early European settlers of the area, who were mostly from Scotland, Ireland and northern England.  These settlers would have brought with them the term chack, which, much like the terms snack, snap, and bite, comes from a verb meaning “to squeeze or crush with teeth”. So, people heard “chack” and interpreted it as jack and then, knowing it meant “a bite to eat”, added bite to get jackbite (this general process, of hearing and re-interpreting, is called folk etymology).

Chack also gave rise to the use of check for snack, a term you might (still) hear in other eastern areas settled by these same people, such as the Blue Ridge mountains.

And so we have as much variation in our names for snacks as we do in the snacks themselves.

A snack snake. Otherwise known as an I-have-way-too-much-time-on-my-hands snack. Clearly we spend our free time in different ways.

As a reward for finishing this blog entry, I think I’ll have a . . .  I’ll have a . . . um. . . I’ll just have tea.

Vegetables

What would you call these?

They’re vegetables (obviously)

Vegetables, right? And if someone asked you, “What are the home-grown things that grow in a garden?” I bet you would have said the same thing.  Maybe to be clever, we can add veggies or the even more clever (cause it’s shorter) veg.

How about garden sauce?  No, it doesn’t mean “sauce” as in liquid-esque-thing-to-pour-on-other-things.  Garden sauce means “vegetables”.

And what grows in a victory garden? Garden sauce.

Garden sauce is an American term which we find in several spelling guises, each of which reflects a variation on pronunciation: we have garden sars, and garden sarse, and possibly my favorite, garden sass.

One very early written appearance of sauce as “vegetable” is in Beverly’s 1705 History of Virginia, “Roots, Herbs, Vine-fruits, and Salate-Flowers‥they dish up‥and find them very delicious Sauce to their Meats”.

We find this term in writing in 1791, “For want of garden sauce, they . . . eat more flesh than is consistent with their health”. Some things never change.

Yes, let’s load our soldiers and allies with carbs and animal fat.

Oh, and why, would sauce mean “vegetables”?

The word sauce comes from the French sauce, kin to the Spanish (and Portuguese and Italian) salsa, all of which descend from Latin salsa, which is the feminine form of salsus “salted”. Salad, also, is descended from the Latin sal “salt”, which makes it an etymological sibling of sauce. We see salad in different forms across Indo-European languages – French and Portuguese salada, Spanish ensalada, German, Swedish and Russian salat – some of which are echoed in different dialects of English.

Look, dancing salat!

Salad refers to a “cold dish of herbs or vegetables (e.g. lettuce, endive), usually uncooked and chopped up or sliced” to which other things can be added. A similar definition can be given for relish, which is also (basically) chopped up sauce.

We’ll deal with relish later, for now it’s back on the sauce.

From Knickerbocker’s 1809 History of New York, we have this delightful quote, “Some buxom country heiress,‥deeply skilled in the mystery of making apple sweetmeats, long sauce, and pumpkin pie”.

Long sauce?  Ahem.  It’s not what you think.

At one time in America, there was a distinction between short sauce and long sauce. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) contains a 1859 quote that details this distinction, with short sauce as radishes, potatoes, turnips, onions, and pumpkins and long sauce as beets, carrots, and parsnips.  And we find info about this long/short sauce distinction mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as well.

But, DARE also has a quote from 1825 that also names round sauce (or “sarse”) as an option.  Round sauce remained undefined, though DARE does have an entry for round squash, also called round sauce squash, round white squash, or white round squash, all of which refer to summer squash (and especially pattypan squash).

I’m betting that this is what ’round sauce’ was

Garden stuff was another old term for “garden vegetables”, as was garden truck.

A truck full of garden truck

Garden truck is also an American term for “garden vegetables”.  These are not, in case you were wondering, vegetables grown in the bed of a pickup (which I have seen).  The use of truck here is much older, harkening back to its original sense as a verb meaning “to give in exchange for”.  Following from the verb, truck the noun comes to mean the “action or practice of trucking; trading by exchange of commodities” and then comes to denote the things being traded.

This is why we can (still) run across a saying such as to have no truck with someone to mean that you “don’t want to have anything to do with them” (a saying that’s been around since at least 1625).

Garden truck is noted in DARE to have appeared in writing (in a Maryland newspaper advertisement) in 1784.  It looks like truck was originally applied to different kinds of goods, including grain, cotton, medicine and other personal goods (the latter also being referred to as traps or junk).

Loading a trunk with truck and traps and junk and stuff

Between the mid-1800s and 1970s, the word trucker could be used to refer to a “gardener who sells produce”.  A truck garden (or truck patch) was the place where you grew such produce.

That “vegetables” can be called sauce, sass, truck, stuff example is a good reminder that a language contains a good many more words for things than you think!

Sprinkles

Because who doesn’t like sprinkles?

Cupcakes like sprinkles.

Perhaps obviously, the term sprinkles developed from the verb to sprinkle, which means “to scatter in drops; to let fall in small particles here and there”.  It makes perfect sense that small particles of sugar strewn here and there atop a cupcake or cookie would come to be known by the action used to scatter them.  The first time sprinkles appears in print to mean “tiny confections” is in a 1921 issue of Western Confectioner magazine, which hails the invention of a “new product being put on the market … in the form of ‘Chocolate Sprinkles’. They are made of chocolate and are used to decorate chocolates by sprinkling on chocolates after dipping; to decorate bon bons, cakes, pastry; also for sprinkling on chocolate sundaes at the fountain”.

Ice cream likes sprinkles too.

Though the American term sprinkles was new in the 1920s, the idea behind it (adding decorative sugar to desserts) had been around for a while.  There were French nonpareils (a topping “without equal”).  As early as 1697, we see quote from the Countess D’Aunoy that speaks of, “certain little Comfits, which in France we call Non-pareil”.

Unparalleled nonpareils.

There are Dutch hagelslag, which are chocolate “hail” invented in 1936 by Gerard de Vries, as well as sugar strands and hundreds and thousands, which are multi-colored British versions.

Hundreds and thousands. Maybe even millions and billions.

We also have ants or jimmies, which are the American terms for chocolate hail (the latter most popular in the northeast).

Jimmies: began as chocolate hail and then went rainbow.

Other terms for these sweet daintrels reflect the various shapes and colors of ‘sprinkle’ that are now produced: confetti (from the Italian plural of confetto “sweetmeat” or “sugarplum”; these were the original treats tossed during carnival in Italy, later morphing into tiny paper or plastic discs), pearls, sequins, as well as a myriad of holiday-themed shapes.

According to the OED, tiddlywinks is British slang for "the knick-knacks of victuals".

It just goes to show that even the tiniest things can illustrate a little language variation.  Sweetly.

Attic

What do you call the space under the roof?  The attic, right?

Oddly enough, attic was originally a Latin adjective, Atticus, meaning “from Attica [Greece]”.  This adjective became especially attached to a particular kind of decorative Greek structure, made of a small architectural ‘order’, placed above a taller, larger one.

Over time, attic becomes a term applied to a small space on top of a larger, main space. Attic is a familiar term now, but there have existed other names for this space in American English.

During the time of the Linguistic Atlas interviews (the 30s and 40s), lots of people in the northern states called this space the garret.  Originally, the word garret referred to a turret on top of a tower (a watch-tower); over time garret comes to mean the “uppermost floor of a house”.

In fact, in the same way we can now say that someone has “bats in their belfry”, in the 16th and 17th centuries, you could have claimed that someone’s “garret was unfurnished” and get the same message across.

In the south and south midland, loft was a common answer to the Atlas question about attic-space.  Loft came into English a long time ago, from Old Norse. Its original meaning was “air, sky” and then “upper room”.

Although the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) explains that it was the loft part of hayloft that traveled across the yard to become used for the area under the house roof, the OED documents the use of loft for “floor, story” dating back to the 14th c.

People living in states under the influence of Louisiana French (Gulf States plus Arkansas and Texas) showed a preference for gallery.  Gallery is a word that came into English from French, ultimately from the medieval Latin galeria (origins further back are uncertain), which referred to a “covered space for walking”, sometimes a space up off the ground.  If we’re up off the ground, it’s easy to see how this word comes to be applied to the attic.

A 1954 Sci-fi book cover. They have rocketships AND dinosaurs in their attic.

Also easy to understand is the use of overhead for attic-space (as in, “Oh, those old things? I put them in the overhead”).  Originally used this way in Pennsylvania, the use of overhead was more widespread by the late 1940s.  It was probably the Pennsylvania Deutsch, with their use of overden that contributed to the use and spread of overhead (overden from owwerdenn, another loan translation from German, which basically is over plus Tenne “floor”).

Other names for attic were cuddy (most likely a lexical gift from seafaring folk, as cuddy is a nautical term for a small room or closet), atticway, and (my personal favorite) sky parlor.

I want a sky parlor.

The next time you visit your “space under the rafters”, remember that a) there are more words for that than you think and b) there’s history tucked up under there too.

Ottoman

Ottoman Empire

Empire Ottoman

The word ottoman (for furniture) first appears  in English in 1789, borrowed from the French (who appear to have borrowed the name from the Turks about 60 years prior).

Etymological rumor (i.e. “the internet”) has it that the ottoman name was given to this piece because the shape of the first ottoman footstools were tall and cylindrical, resembling the traditional hats worn by Turkish government officials.

Here’s a vintage hat.

Maybe?

And a vintage ottoman.

You decide.

At any rate, the French started a trend, as this piece (and its name) was borrowed into Italian (1797), Catalan (1888), Spanish (1849), and German (1772).

Whether the ottoman started off “tall and cylindrical” or not, today’s canonical ottoman is a “low upholstered seat without a back or arms” that also serves as storage “with the seat hinged to form a lid”.   Multipurpose is again king, which is probably why the ottoman (or storage ottoman) is so popular.

Shortly after the borrowing of ottoman, English borrows the term velours ottoman for a velvet-like fabric used for upholstering ottomans. Ottomen.  Whatever.

We can talk about fabric later.

Prior to the ottoman, the English people (and language) had footstools, the earliest term for which was a shamble, a common Germanic adoption from the Latin scamellum (for, um, ‘footstool’).

In writing, we see shamble occurring over a lengthy period of time, from 825 to the late 1400s, though the earliest uses of this particular term were mainly figurative.  For instance, the first example listed in the OED is a snippet that goes something like, “I won’t quit until I set your enemy as your footstool” (my creative translation). Shamble is later applied to a butcher’s stand at a meat market, and then to the market as a whole. By the 17th c, the word becomes a term for “chaos and disorder”, a reflection of the appearance of a street market crammed with stalls and tradespeople hawking their wares – a place in shambles.

Other early synonyms for footstool were the familiar, more general, labels of stool (with its first written appearance in 1250) and bench (1386), re-appropriated when needed to denote the responsibility of upholding feet.

Buffet is another potential synonym of ottoman.  Note that this is buffet with the “t” (not to be confused with buffet without the “t”, a member of the case furniture family).  Buffet (“t”) is a low footstool, a name and form still used by people in Scotland and northern parts of England.

In fact, it could be that Ms Muffet originally perched upon a buffet instead of tuffet.

Eating her curds and whey

Note that Ms Muffet is sitting on grass.  Well, as it happens, another term for an ottoman is hassock, from the Old English hassuc, related to the Welsh hesq, which means “sedge” (a kind of grass).  Hassock originally referred to a “tuft or clump of matted grass”, the tuft or clump also being called a tussock.

Tussocks (Hassocks)

It might be that tussock pushes buffet to become tuffet.

There’s more.

In the early 1500s, people writing about a hassock are talking about a “thick, firm cushion or bass, often stuffed with rushes or straw”  used especially in places of worship for kneeling.

Hassocks (tussocks) were cut from fields and then shaped and trimmed and brought into churches for people to kneel on.  Later on, as the ‘cushion’ moves into homes, straw hassocks are covered with fabric, and are eventually crafted more purposefully (if you will) as upholstered stools.

Bass, as appears in the definition of hassock above, is a phonetic corruption of bast, a word that originally  means “split rushes or straw” (read: grass) and also later expands to refer to something made out of such material (such as mats, baskets and, oh, I don’t know, hassocks).

The history implicit in an object such as this boggles the mind.

Allow me one last (near) synonym of ottoman.

Pouf.

From the French word for an “elaborate female headdress fashionable in the late 18th c”, pouf migrates somewhat as it comes to refer to a “part of a dress . . . gathered up to form a bunch” in the mid-19th c, and, finally, toward the end of that century, pouf is an ottoman.

Pouf. Just like that.

Both pouf and ottoman begin their word-lives on top of the head and travel an etymological journey to the space underneath our feet.  Coincidence?  Perhaps.