Chapter 2

Breakfasting

For many of us the day begins with a cup of tea; this drink was first imported into Britain early in the seventeenth century, becoming very popular by the 1650s. The London diarist Samuel Pepys drained his first cup in 1660, as recorded in his famous diary: ‘I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I had never drunk before.’ A love of tea is so ingrained in British life that the phrase cup of tea has come to stand for anything viewed positively. In the 1930s what interested someone was termed their tea; today we can express our dislike for something by saying: it’s not my cup of tea. When someone is distressed or bereaved, we console them with tea and sympathy, a phrase taken from the title of a 1950s film. More recently, tea has seen a rise in use as a slang term for ‘gossip’, with those on social media imploring each other to spill the tea.

Tea

The word tea derives ultimately from the Mandarin Chinese word chá, via (‘by way of’, from Latin via ‘road’) the Min dialect form te. The Mandarin word is also the origin of the informal word char, heard today in phrases like a nice cup of char. The Chinese origin of the plant is remembered in the idiom not for all the tea in China, meaning ‘certainly not’, ‘not at any price’, which originated in Australian slang of the 1890s.

By the eighteenth century tea had become a symbol of fashionable society and a staple of the coffee house culture. Samuel Johnson was a self-confessed ‘hardened and shameless tea-drinker . . . whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning’. As tea-drinking developed into an elaborate social ritual, so did the associated paraphernalia. From the eighteenth century we find references to tea-spoons, tea-boxes, tea-tongs, tea-kitchens (similar to a modern tea-urn), tea-caddies (from catty, a unit of weight, ultimately derived from Malay kati); sets comprising cups, saucers, tea-pots, and other essentials were known as tea-equipage, or rather more prosaically as tea-things, or tea-services (as they still are today). The trade in growing, selling, and administering tea created a need for tea-growers, tea-sifters, and tea-ladies (nowadays associated with a tea-trolley and tea-urn); the grandest ceremonies were overseen by a tea-hostess or tea-master to ensure proper etiquette was observed.

The large sums of money involved in the importing of this luxury commodity prompted efforts to regulate the trade, resulting in tea-tax, tea-duty, and tea-broker. The Boston Tea Party of 1773, when British tea was offloaded from ships into Boston harbour in protest at taxation, is the inspiration behind the name of the US Republican Tea Party movement, although some commentators have interpreted this as a backronym (an unhistorical explanation of a word’s origin, blending back and acronym) for ‘taxed enough already’. Historical terms like tea-user and tea-dealer recall the lexicon of today’s illicit drug trade, while in modern US slang a tea-head refers to someone who regularly smokes marijuana, and a tea-pad to a drugs den.

The drinking of tea became such an established feature of English social life that we find references to tea-breakfasts, tea-soirées, tea-picnics, tea-visits, tea-dinners, and even tea-fights (a slang term for a tea-party rather than a bun-fight). A great frequenter of such events, assumed to be acting from disreputable motives, was known as a tea-hound. The light refreshment taken in the afternoon is still known as tea, although in some parts of Britain this is now used to refer to the evening meal. But how many households retain the tea-bell, used to summon the family to assemble at the appointed hour?

Although the morning cup of tea can be an essential way of starting the day, there is a range of terms testifying to the dangers of excessive tea-drinking, such as tea-sot (sot is a word for a drunken fool) and tea-drunkard: ‘one who habitually drinks tea to such excess as to suffer from its toxic effects’. To be described as tea-faced implied a ‘sallow or effeminate countenance like one addicted to tea-drinking’. Over-consumption of tea can also be a source of flatulence, as suggested by the origins of the expression ‘More tea, Vicar?’ used to cover the embarrassment prompted by some social faux pas (French for ‘false step’, referring to an embarrassing or tactless remark). This phrase is supposed to originate in an effort to fill an awkward silence caused by a vicar breaking wind at a tea-party: ‘More tea, Vicar?’ the genteel hostess asked in a deft attempt to save the clergyman’s blushes. But the vicar—unversed in the niceties of social etiquette—responded bluntly: ‘No thank you, it makes me fart.’

Tea is usually followed by breakfast; this term for the first meal of the day dates from the fifteenth century—the Anglo-Saxons knew it as forme-mete ‘early food’. Other words have been used over the years; in the eighteenth century, the French word déjeuner was adopted into English. Today this refers to lunch in French, while breakfast is known as petit déjeuner ‘little lunch’—a term initially employed to refer to a light lunch or morning snack. The origins of déjeuner are similar to those of breakfast, since it is based upon the Latin de (a reversative prefix) and jejunus ‘fasting’, literally ‘undoing fasting’, as breakfast means to break one’s fast. The Latin word jejunus is also the root of jejune—originally meaning ‘without food’, this word came to be used metaphorically to signal something that lacks intellectual nourishment. If you are feeling especially hungry you might opt for a meat breakfast, or fork breakfast—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century names for what is now usually known as an English breakfast, or full English. Alternatively you could choose a more traditional option such as porridge, although perhaps not in its original form of a thick stew; the word began life as a variant form of pottage (from Latin potagium ‘broth’) and only in the seventeenth century started to be used of the oatmeal dish served at breakfast. The frequency with which prisoners were served porridge led to the expression doing porridge to refer to time spent in prison, also reflected in the expression in stir. Alternatively you may choose to follow the advice of the Egg Marketing Board in the 1960s and go to work on an egg.

Eggs

The word egg is a borrowing from the Old Norse language; before the Viking invasions, the Anglo-Saxons used the related word æg (pronounced ‘ay’). The Latin word for egg is ovum (plural ova) which is the origin of oval (‘egg-shaped’), ovary, ovulate, and Ovaltine (so called because it consists of dried egg). The egg white also goes by the technical term albumen, from Latin albus ‘white’—also the name given to the white-bearded Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts. The name for the yolk also derives from its colour, since it is a form of Old English geolu ‘yellow’.

The importance of eggs is apparent from the way we categorize people as good eggs, bad eggs, and rotten eggs. Someone who is unsentimental and ruthless is hard-boiled; less commonly, the opposite qualities can prompt the label soft-boiled. A particularly difficult person to deal with may be described as a tough egg to crack; confronting people like this can leave you feeling as if you are walking on eggshells. At all costs you should avoid teaching your grandmother to suck eggs—giving someone instruction in something self-evident—especially if she is an egghead, a colloquial term for an intellectual. If, in your desire to please, you are guilty of over-embellishing and exaggerating, you may be accused of over-egging the pudding. When you find you’ve had enough you can always rotten-egg them—literally, using a method of expressing disdain that has become a regular feature of political protest, or metaphorically, by critiquing or ridiculing someone. Someone prone to interrupting with unfounded rumours and tall stories is said to come in with five eggs a penny and four of them rotten; the simplest response to such interventions is: go suck an egg!

The importance of eggs to material existence is apparent from the way they feature in expressions concerning future planning. An investment for the future is a nest egg; one that is absolutely certain may be as sure as eggs is eggs, or as safe as eggs; a riskier proposition is to place all your eggs in one basket—that is, to bet everything on a single venture. Similar ideas lie behind idioms that are now obsolete. If you are tricked by a conman, you could find yourself being given eggs for money—exchanging a thing of value for something worthless. You could retaliate by breaking the egg in their pocket, an eighteenth-century expression meaning to spoil someone’s plan. But be warned—if your plan goes wrong, you could end up with egg on your face.

Should you decide to have an omelette for breakfast you will need to break your eggs, since—as the saying goes—you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. This proverb, recognizing that significant accomplishments generally require some form of sacrifice or adverse effect, is first recorded in the eighteenth century and is based upon an earlier French equivalent: on ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des œufs. There’s no arguing with the logic of this phrase, though it is also true of pretty much any dish made using eggs. Despite appearances, the word omelette is unconnected to the eggs from which it is made. Instead, it derives from Latin lamella ‘thin plate’; this became Old French alemele—the additional ‘a’ was due to confusion as to where the definite article la ‘the’ ended and the word began. This word was used to refer to a thin plate, as in Latin, but also the blade of a knife—from this it came to be used of the egg dish, probably because of its similarly thin, flat shape. The change in the opening vowel from ‘a’ to ‘o’ may have been the result of an association with the word œuf ‘egg’—an association further suggested by the now defunct (Latin defunctus ‘dead’) form œufmelete.

For a lighter start to the day you could choose a bowl of cereal; made by roasting grain, cereal takes its name from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Or perhaps you’d prefer a Continental breakfast—despite its name, this term usually refers more specifically to the kind of breakfast consumed by the French. Typically, this consists of a loaf of French bread, or French stick, known more poetically in French as a baguette, meaning ‘small rod, wand’ (from Latin baculum ‘staff’). The same word lies behind imbecile, which literally means ‘without a staff’, and was initially used to describe someone who was physically rather than mentally frail. The French stick may be accompanied by croissants, from the French word for ‘crescent’, which take their name from their shape. Both crescent and croissant go back to Latin crescens, meaning ‘waxing’ or ‘growing’, which was originally used to describe the period between a new moon and a full moon, when it appears to be growing. It was only later that the word was transferred to objects whose shape resembled that of the moon at this time.

If you want to be genuinely continental you could sample a variety of national delicacies, such as a waffle, from a Germanic root meaning ‘honeycomb’; pumpernickel, a dark rye German bread from pumper ‘fart’ and Nickel, a pet form of the name Nikolaus; bagel, a Yiddish term that is related to an Old English word for a metal arm-ring; or a muffin, rather more prosaically from a Germanic root meaning ‘little cake’. The Italian bread known as focaccia means ‘bread baked in the hearth’; its origins lie in the Latin word focus ‘hearth, fireplace’. For the Romans the focus was the centre of the home—the place where the cooking was done and where the household deity was worshipped. Focus was first adopted into English in the seventeenth century as a geometrical term referring to a fixed point from which the distances to any point of a curve are connected; from this it subsequently widened to refer to any centre of interest. Another Italian bread, the ciabatta, takes its name from a dialect term for an old shoe with a worn-down heel—a reference to the shape of the loaf.

The plain English bread derives from an Old English word, also recorded in other Germanic languages, probably going back to a root meaning ‘piece, fragment, morsel’, represented in Latin by frustum. But this was not the usual term in Old English, which instead preferred hlaf—the origin of modern English loaf. The importance of this foodstuff to life in Anglo-Saxon England is apparent in the etymology of the words lord and lady: these derive from Old English hlaford ‘guardian of the bread’ and hlafdige ‘kneader of the bread’. Now obsolete, but revived briefly in the nineteenth century, is the Old English term hlafæta ‘loaf-eater’, used to describe a household servant who consumes the bread supplied by the lord. A similar explanation lies behind the later coinage beefeater, which was used contemptuously of well-fed servants. Bread is central to a number of common English terms and expressions: a breadwinner is the person who earns the money to support a family; to have the bread taken out of one’s mouth is to lose a job. If you know on which side your bread is buttered, you are aware of where your interests lie; to butter one’s bread on both sides, on the other hand, is to be wasteful or overly indulgent. Cockney rhyming slang lies behind the expression use your loaf, meaning ‘think about it, use your common sense’, since loaf of bread rhymes with head.

The butter that you smear on your bread has changed little from the Old English word butere, which is ultimately derived from Greek bouturon. Bread and butter is considered such a staple that having one’s bread and butter signifies the necessities of life, while to have one’s bread buttered for life suggests that you are set up for the future. The slippery nature of butter has given rise to an association with flattery, as in the verb butter up, though such attempts may not always have the desired effect since, as the proverb notes, fine words butter no parsnips. Alternatively you may prefer to use margarine, which is named after the Greek margaron ‘pearl’—a reference to the similarity of its appearance to mother-of-pearl. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, margarine was originally pronounced with a hard ‘g’; the soft sound is recorded from the early twentieth century, paving the way for the more common abbreviated form: marge.

You might also wish to add a dollop of a fruit preserve, better known in England as jam and in the US as jelly—from Latin gelata ‘frozen’, also the root of congeal. The name jam comes from the verb meaning ‘push, squeeze’—a reference to the squashing and pulping involved in the production process. Where bread and butter represent life’s necessities, jam has come to signal any kind of additional treat. To want jam on it suggests a desire for an easy life, while money for jam refers to a cushy assignment with the additional benefit of getting paid. But, be warned, the offer of jam tomorrow might sound promising, but instead refers to a promise for the future that is never delivered—a phrase that originates in Lewis Carroll’s second Alice novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871): ‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day’ (the hyphens in to-morrow and to-day reminding us that these were originally separate words).

Given the unreliability of jam, it might seem safer to stick to marmalade. Indeed, the popular accounts of its origins suggest that it has medicinal properties, since it is often thought to have been concocted as a medicine for Mary Queen of Scots when she was ill. From Marie malade (French for ‘ill’), it is alleged, we derived the word marmalade. The true origins of the word are rather more straightforward; marmalade is derived from quince jam known in Portuguese as marmelada—from marmelo ‘quince’, which goes back to Greek melimelon, literally ‘honey apple’. If you are more Winnie-the-Pooh than Paddington Bear, you might be tempted to reach down the honey pot. Honey is a Germanic word in origin, first recorded in Old English as hunig—revealing that Pooh bear’s spelling hunny is actually more authentic than the standard form. Once your bread has been smothered with honey it is literally mellifluent—this word, meaning ‘pleasant-sounding’, is derived from a Latin word meaning ‘flowing with honey’.

The more health-conscious, however, might shun these carbohydrates smeared in sugar and instead opt for something fruity—getting a start on the now obligatory five-a-day.

Fruits

Fruits are an essential part of our diet and also of our language. Something we approve of may be a peach, a plum, top banana, or the apple of our eye. Someone we dislike is a bad apple, while a particularly difficult character can drive us bananas. We can show our disdain for someone by handing them a lemon, not giving a fig, passing them the rough end of the pineapple, or blowing a raspberry. While the apple is seen as the key to healthy living—an apple a day keeps the doctor away—it also forms the basis of the names for many fruits. The Greek word for the apple, melos, is the origin of melon; its Latin equivalent appears in persicum malum ‘Persian apple’—the source of English peach. The Romans also used pomum (ancestor of French pomme), found in the pomum granatum ‘many-seeded apple’, which gives us the English pomegranate.

The word apple originates in the Old English æppel used by the Anglo-Saxons; related forms appear in all Germanic languages—compare German Apfel, Dutch appel, and Swedish äpple. Apple also crops up in the name of fruits that are not apples, such as pineapple. Modelled on Latin pomum pini, pineapple was initially used to refer to the pine cone (as French pomme de pin still does); the resemblance of the fruit to the pine cone led to a change in meaning. Many languages instead use a word based upon nanas (French ananas)—the name given to the fruit in the language of the Tupi people of Peru, where Europeans first encountered the plant. The sixteenth-century love apple, a translation of the French pomme d’amour, was an alternative name for the tomato—a reference to the fruit’s supposed aphrodisiac properties. Modern English tomato originates in the Mexican tomatl; the change from tomate to tomato was probably triggered by comparison with potato (from Spanish patata)—a case of ‘you say tomate, I say tomato’ perhaps. The sixteenth-century mad apple, or raging apple, from French pomme de rage, was neither an apple nor a tomato, but an aubergine (known in the US as an eggplant).

A number of fruits are types of berry, from Old English berie, used to refer to small roundish fruits without stones. Of the various compounds formed with berry, some describe colour—blackberry, blueberry—others, such as the loganberry, preserve the name of the horticulturalist (from Latin hortus ‘garden’) who first cultivated them. Etymologists still puzzle over the first element of strawberry; it may refer either to the stalks or the yellow seed-like dots. The cran of cranberry probably derives from an association with the crane—gooseberry suggests a similarly mysterious connection with the goose—while the mul of mulberry derives less obscurely from Latin morum, the name for the mulberry tree. The first element of raspberry originates in the obsolete raspis, a collective term for raspberries. Examples like these—where the first element relates to no independent English word—are known to linguists as cranberry morphemes.

The grape gets its name from a Germanic root meaning ‘hook’—referring to the object used to harvest them. Raisin, the English term for a dried grape, is borrowed from the French word for grape, itself derived from Latin racemus ‘bunch of grapes’. The word currant originates in the French raisin de Corinthe ‘grape of Corinth’, since currants are the dried fruit prepared from a grape grown in the Levant. Although Old English had the word ciris, cherry was borrowed from the Northern French dialect word cherise (compare the standard modern French form cerise). The ‘s’ ending was mistakenly understood to be a plural, and consequently the singular cherry was formed.

Although it entered English from Spanish, apricot goes back to the Latin word praecox, meaning ‘early ripening’; this is also the root of precocious, used to describe children who are intellectually advanced for their age. The nectarine is from the adjectival form of nectar, now the sugary fluid secreted by flowers, but originally used in Greek and Roman mythology to refer to the drink of the gods. The food consumed by the classical deities, known as ambrosia, is preserved in the French word framboise ‘raspberry’—from Latin fraga ambrosia ‘ambrosial strawberry’.

From further afield comes the orange, a borrowing from French that has its origins in the Arabic naranj; loss of the initial ‘n’ occurred in French through assimilation with the ‘n’ of the indefinite article un. Lemon is also of Arabic origin, although it entered English via the French limon, now only used of the lime (la lime) in French, which uses citron for lemon (the root of English citric). Tangerines are so called because they originate in the Moroccan port of Tangier, while satsumas take their name from the Japanese province in the island of Kyushu. The mandarin orange gets its name from the similarity of the pale orange colour of the peel to the yellow silk robes worn by the senior members, or mandarins (from Hindi mantri ‘counsellor’), of the imperial Chinese civil service.