Bonzer Words!: Would You Like Fries With That?
Wordsman Brian Barratt takes us on a linguistic tour of our local fast food outlets.
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Your local fast-food outlet is one of the most multi-cultural places you’ll find! You and your old pal walk in and ask for a hamburger. You use words that are something to do with your purchase. It’s amazing where some of those words originally came from:
beetroot Old Norse
bun Scandinavian
butter Greek
cabbage French
cheese Saxon
chutney Hindi
coffee Arabic via Turkish & Italian
coleslaw Dutch
dollar German
espresso Italian
gherkin Greek via Slav & Dutch
hamburger German via USA
ketchup Chinese dialect
lemonade Arabic via French
pal Romani (Gypsy)
potato Taino via Spanish
sugar Sanskrit via French
tea Chinese
tomato Nahauti via Spanish
If you’re looking for ‘good old Anglo-Saxon’ words in use for more than 1,000 years, here are a few:
bread - could mean a morsel of food, or bread as we know it.
cheese - from Old English cese and other spellings.
crisp - originally meant ‘curly, then ‘brittle’ in the 16th century, first used of potato crisps in the 1920s.
milk - Old English meolc, milc and other spellings.
pepper - yes, it’s been a spice in English for over 1,000 years, Old English pipor, piper.
salt - Old English sealt.
seed - the first known occurrence in print in English is from the 9th century but the sesame seeds on your bun were unknown before the early 1400s, when they came via French from Arabic.
Mind you, if we come back to the question in the title, we have a problem. Writing in Australia, I have to advise you:
§ In Britain, chips are crisps and French fries are chips.
§ In the USA, chips are French fries. The term ‘French fries’ seems to have appeared first in the USA in about 1918. Before that, crisps and chips were both called chips, so the new term would have been useful.
§ In Australia, we buy our crisps in a bag labelled ‘chips’ but at a fast-food establishment we are asked if we would like ‘large fries’ or ‘small fries’.
§ The French have frites, which are fried potatoes or chips. Germans have Pomme frites, (French for fried potatoes) for chips, and Chips for crisps.
Oh dear, I’m confused. I think I’ll just have the mashed potatoes, thank you.
Mashed? Of course, sir. Did you know that ‘mash’ comes from Old English masc, which didn’t refer to potatoes at all? It meant malt pressed into water to form the liquid from which beer was to be made.
If you’re having a beer, you might like fries with that?
Copyright © 2003, 2007 Brian Barratt
