Adam Aleksic on Gastroetymology Today (video)
Adam Aleksic is the creator of The Etymology Nerd, a small online etymology empire. He regularly publishes stories about words on Instagram, Twitter and his own blog, and he has produced some wonderful infographics that cover collections of words: all the major Car brands, types of pasta, and neighborhood names within various cities. Adam is currently studying linguistics and government at Harvard University, and over the holiday we talked about gastroetymology and how his curiosity for words turned into this larger, online endeavor.
Here’s an edited video and transcript of our conversation.
You can find and follow his work on Instagram, Twitter, and The Etymology Nerd.
INTERVIEW
Eric: Adam runs The Etymology Nerd and the related Twitter and Instagram accounts of the same name, and he’s made these fantastic infographics about food etymology, including things like apple varieties, candy bars, cheeses, et cetera. Adam, welcome. I’m really excited to talk to you.
Adam: Thank you for having me.
Eric: I’m curious if you remember the earliest point when you started being interested in words.
Adam: I do remember. It was March, 2016. I was in Cambridge, England for my half-sister’s wedding. I was in a bookstore and stumbled across Mark Forsyth’s book, the Etymologicon, which is a fascinating journey through the English language. He takes you through a bunch of different words that are connected, and that book got me into the field. I highly recommend it for anybody casually interested in etymology.
So six months after that, I decided I wanted more excuses to learn. I was doing an unpublished blog just to myself. I wanted to learn a word every day, and I figured I might publish it when it got less bad. Then a few months in, I started making some infographics of maps and how certain place names got their origins. I was trying to convey etymology in a way that both makes it easier for me to understand and for other people too.
Eric: I think one of the most fascinating things about the infographics that you’ve done is that the patterns within them become immediately apparent.
In food naming, there are plenty of patterns. Foods are named after places: everything from a HAMBURGER named after Hamburg, FRANKFURTER named after Frankfurt. Those may be less visible to some people, but the food’s name origin is a place. This is obvious with cheese.
Adam: My favorite cheese is MANCHEGO. I like how it’s named after the Spanish region of La Mancha where it literally means the stain in Spanish.
GORGONZOLA is also really interesting. It’s a village near Milan named after the Roman goddess, Concordia. You can sort of see that etymology change where the G to C happens because a voiced velar stop became a voiceless one.
You can see that the K sound, which is you making a closure with your tongue and the velum of your mouth. The G is the exact same sound, except you vibrate your vocal chords when you say it. So Concordia becomes GORGONZOLA, the C became G.
It’s always kind of cool to see that in action.
Eric: That was from Latin into Italian?
Adam: Yeah. I also think it is kind of cool how FETA means slice.
Eric: Yes, FETA means slice and MOZZARELLA is another cheese originally named slice in Italian.
Adam: And then there is RICOTTA which means cooked again. BISCUIT is similar and means twice-cooked.
Eric: Yes, when you make a cheese like, say a MOZZARELLA, you heat it, strain it, and there are left over the curds from the process. You cook them again and that’s how you get ricotta. It’s re-cooked or twice-cooked. I love that one.
There’s another more obscure dish in Italian called a RIBOLLITA, a kind of vegetable stew. You cook it, let it sit to soak in flavor, and then reboil it. RIBOLLITA is reboiled, like RICOTTA is recooked.
The Germans have a cousin to the BISCOTTI. It’s a toast called ZWIEBACK, twice-baked. That’s directly taken from the Italian BISCOTTI or BISCOTTO.
Adam: Let’s move onto the pastas. There are some really good ones here.
Eric: This is interesting because it’s clear somebody went crazy with these names. At first someone came up with something clever and cute, and then there was an explosion. People were like, what can we make now? What can we make that looks like a bow tie or a spindle.
Adam: I’m not sure about the causality, but there’s definitely a trend going on. I love STROZZAPRETI. It comes from the Italian word for strangle or choke and preti is the plural of priest.
So it’s priest strangler and, and like the reason for that is disputed. Some people think it’s because priests eat it so ravenously that their gluttony strangles them. Another theory is that when you’re kneading the dough, you, you like need the dose so aggressively that it’s like you’re strangling a priest.
I’m also a big fan of LINGUINE meaning little tongues.
Eric: Yes. A huge number of these have a diminutive at the end, which makes them so cute. They’re fun to say, and I actually think if it was just tongues, you’d be like, um, that sounds weird.
But with little tongues, that’s adorable, give me a bowl. Any thoughts on diminutives as a pattern in pasta and other food stuff.
Adam: Well, Italian words and a lot of other romance languages really love diminutives. Pasta is small and cute so it makes sense that you’d attach a diminutive suffix to it. You also get this kind of thing in people’s names a lot.
Eric: When you’re trying to get kids to eat, these diminutive endings add a bit of levity. Do you want a little SPAGHETTI or RAVIOLI?
It’s got a lightness to it that makes it entertaining.
Adam: Definitely.
Eric: Here too in the pastas we have a couple of words meaning cut or slice. FETTUCCINE which comes from the same cut as FETA. There’s also TAGLIATELLE, which is from TAGLIARE, to cut.
Adam: That makes sense. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re cutting pasta, you’re slicing cheese.
Eric: That brings up another food pattern: method of preparation or at least a step in the preparation. That shows up in food names.
So you have slices, you have cuts, but you have others here. MACARONI from bruise or crush, MACCARE. Words like crush or pound are pervasive in food. But I think the larger idea that the method itself ends up getting encased in the name is fascinating.
Adam: I’ve noticed a lot of this, to pound, to mash, stuff like that. It’s very frequent.
Eric: Method is obvious in ordinary English. You have to think about it for a second, but there are MASHED POTATOES, BAKED POTATOES, BOILED POTATOES. We sort of forget that those are signaling some distinction of preparation. Those are descriptive, but it’s interesting when they sort of get hidden in another language, like perhaps MACARONI.
Adam: That’s really interesting, MASHED POTATOES. It’s a separate word but it’s part of the name. I could see 200 years down the line, MASHED POTATOES becoming one word together and we wouldn’t think twice about it.
Eric: Yes! Think about FRENCH FRIED POTATOES which became FRENCH FRIES and now are often just FRIES. We’re just left with the method all by itself. Similarly, people make a ROAST, even though it’s actually a ROAST BEFF. BISCUIT which you brought up earlier, was originally in PANIS BIS COCTUS in Latin, bread twice-cooked. We just dropped the bread part entirely and now we’re just saying twice-cooked.
Back to pasta. Someone had fun naming these body parts and animals, strangling priests and things like that. There was a level of whimsey in this process. You see it a little in pastry names but not to the this level.
Adam: Right. You look at cheese, all place names. No whimsy. But pasta was a very fun infographic to make.
Eric: Let’s go to the apples. This is a good example to see foods named after individual people, often a person directly responsible for cultivating it.
Adam: Yes. It had never occurred to me that GRANNY SMITH was an actual person, but she was the blind old lady who came up with the variety in her New Zealand garden. She died shortly after starting to produce it, and her kids named it after their grandma.
There’s several other examples along those lines.
What also stood out was names are made for purely marketing purposes. The JAZZ and ENVY varieties both created by the New Zealand marketer Enza. JAZZ was named to capture its percussive crunch. After I made it, a guy from the marketing company contacted me, and I got to talk to him about his naming process.
There’s actually so many interesting factors that go into an apple name. Since it’s an international product, you have to make it easy to pronounce for many people. You can’t put an L in the name of an apple product because it’s difficult to pronounce in languages that don’t have our L. Similarly, the -TION suffix is too complicated.
Eric: The other apple here is the McIntosh which I think is very funny. I was named there after a specific person, a farmer John McIntosh. But that name has now become the computer I’m working on, a Mac.
Two hops away from a farmer, you’ve got a company in California, Apple, that names an early computer, the Macintosh. That Macintosh gets shortened to a Mac, and so now we’re going around saying some farmer’s last name whenever we’re referencing a Mac.
Adam: There’s also a reason that the ‘A’ was thrown in there. The guy who started the Macintosh project for Apple in 1979 was, was Jeff Raskin. He wanted to name it McIntosh, like the Apple. But it was like a legal issue to have it. Spelled that way, because there was also a company for audio equipment called McIntosh laboratory. So they had to throw the A in for copyright reasons.
Eric: Switching topics, here’s a package I came across in the grocery store the other day. We’ll talk about the etymology a bit, but this is unusually romantic packaging. Tell me why this is so odd given this particular bread.
Adam: I’m glad you asked. So PUMPERNICKEL comes from a German insult, meaning stupid person, but more literally it meant goblin fart or demon fart. The bread is so indigestible that it’s akin to goblin farting or causes it. Earlier the Germans had another word for it, krankbrot or sick bread. So you can see that there wasn’t a lot of love for it.
Eric: So the pumper is fart and nickel is demon, right?
Adam: Pumper means fart and nickel meant a lot of things. It’s a diminutive of Nicholas, which in turn, comes from the goddess of victory, Nike. It was just associated with goblin characters historically.
Eric: In short, the bread is basically fart demon. So if you look at this picture on the package and realize that in German this bread reads as fart demon, then the picture makes demonstrably less sense.
Adam: I definitely find that amazing.
Eric: Here’s another example from the grocery store. One of the Latin bread words was PANIS, but we didn’t get our bread words from it in English. But PANIS words do sneak in through the other Latin languages.
First, you have the ubiquitous PANINI. That sandwich is named after a little bread.
But then there’s the PAIN AU CHOCOLAT or other French bread words with PAIN. If you took high school French those are easy to spot.
But then also I think things like EMPANADAS, which means wrapped in bread. That’s a Spanish word. So you’ve got Italian, French, Spanish, and then this one is fascinating, PANKO. PANKO, the breaded crust, is of course Japanese.
Adam: Not only is it Japanese, but it comes through Portuguese. There’s a whole Wikipedia page on Japanese words that were borrowed from Portuguese because it’s such a common thing. Back when they were trading with them in the 1600s. Japanese often borrows parts of words and then attaches their own.
PAN is bread from the Portugeuse, PAO and KO is flour from Japanese. They combined them to make PANKO.
Another example, not food-related, is karaoke. They borrow the word for orchestra. That became oke, and then kara meant empty. So empty orchestra karaoke was created in Japan, and then that word was brought back to America.
Eric: That’s great. I did not know empty orchestras. Fascinating.
Eric: So the Portugeuse are trading with Japanese in the 1600s, and the Japanese crib a couple of words. Over a few hundred years those become pretty embedded in Japanese, so when they come back to us through English, we assume they’re Japanese words.
But to have a PAN word for something bread-like would be weird because Japanese has no linguistic relationship to Latin. It’s just fascinating the path it took to get there.
Adam: I also really like EMPANADA. It was Spanish past participle adjective of EMPANAR which was a verb meaning to roll into a pastry and fry. That comes from EM, meaning in, and PAN meaning bread, but another phonological change is that when an EM occurs before P it’s brought to the lips instead of making a sound behind your teeth. You move it to the front of your mouth and it’s assimilated to where you produce the P sound. So it’s EM-panada instead of EN-panada.
Eric: The other one before we leave is another Japanese Portuguese trick, TEMPURA. The Portuguese had four holidays where they basically abstained from meat eating. Those were referenced as quatuor anni tempora, four yearly times. The Portuguese traders living in Japan would deep fry veggies and perhaps seafood on these holidays.
So the TEMP in TEMPURA is just Latin for time, from the four times. So that’s another Latin thing that snuck into Japanese through Portuguese. You couldn’t think of TEMPURA as anything but than a Japanese food word, but then you’re like, wait a second, that’s just time.
Adam: That’s really interesting.
Eric: Once you have a couple of these loaded in your head, it’s very hard not to walk into a grocery store and see these things. It becomes a sort of infinite puzzle or infinite game.
Adam: Yes! It’s a game. That’s the joy of studying etymology. You’re always on the search for a new word origin. You’re always looking out for a connection or what route something could have come from.
Eric: Let’s go onto honey. Our honey word is Germanic in origin, but the Latin and Greek one is this MELLIS word or MEL.
Adam: So a MELLIS is actually the genitive singular of Mel which meant honey. And that comes from the proto-European root MELIT also meaning honey. There are a ton of words that spawn from this. So CARAMEL means cane honey. CARA comes from Latin CANA meaning cane. Marmalade is from Greek.
The MELI part means honey and MELON meant apple. The original word was MELIMELON or honey Apple.
MOLASSES was originally a type of wine in Latin, and the name meant resembling honey.
You got a MOUSSE, like chocolate MOUSSE, comes from a Latin word for MEAD.
Also, mellifluous or sweet sounding, that means flowing with honey. Mildew is honeydew. The name Melissa originally meant honeybee in ancient Greek. So you got all these very cool connections. I love it. When you’ve got one so many different words come from it.
Eric: The image I have is almost like this firework. Let’s say you have this one root, like MELLIS, and then it sort of explodes through sometimes multiple languages, and get this starburst of other words.
It is a little harder to see with MELLIS because that’s not our honey word, so people have to know that to see all of these are variations on honey.
Adam: I started learning Latin to find these things in English and it’s definitely paid off.
Eric: In addition to Melissa, I think there Deborah is also honeybee, but from Hebrew.
Let’s go through one more list of words.
Adam: Yeah, so CAULIS was an early Latin word for stem or anything resembling a stem. I think it also meant penis. A lot of things in Latin meant that.
We get a COLE in coleslaw through the old English word CAWEL. COLLARD was a Southern U.S. corruption of COLEWART, which was the middle English word for CABBAGE.
And then you have a KALE, which was a Scottish variant of the COLE in COLESLAW.
Eric: Kale is awesome because that K sneaks up on you. It completely disguises the whole thing. You never think of KALE as a cabbage leaf or cabbage word, but it is.
Okay. So that is what I have. Are any others that you want to talk about?
Adam: I mentioned TIRAMISU which is Italian for pick me up. The origin has something to do with Italian brothels. Some people think that it might have been served as an aphrodisiac, others that prostitutes made it in between breaks.
Tangentially, I’m reminded of that PUTTANESCA means sluttish in Italian.
Eric: So we have a priest strangler on one side, we’ve got PUTTANESCA, which has a prostitute sauce on the other side.
These are a few of the foods named after occupations. Can you think of any others? This is fun. It’s like a game show.
Adam: I’m sure one will come.
Eric: Back on your cheese infographic, you had COTTAGE CHEESE, which is also called FARMER’S CHEESE. There’s also a bunch of hunter foods, right? hunter sausage in German is JAGERWURST. In Hungarian you have GOULASH for a hunter’s stew. There are other hunter foods.
Adam: SHEPHERD’S PIE.
Eric: That’s a great one. There are also two other Italian pasta sauces. One is MARINARA and the anecdotal story is that it’s sailor sauce. Sailor is MARINAIO from MARE for sea, and the sauce was named because it kept well on long sea voyages. Or MARINARA was made in celebration when sailors returned home. So, it is a sailor sauce.
Similarly there’s CARBONARA, or coal miner’s sauce. This was made for or loved by coal miners. So we got a MARINARA, a CARBONARA, a PUTTANESCA, all on top of a priest strangler.
Adam: I’ll definitely be adding that to my blog.
Eric: One last question. On your blog you’ve reviewed more than a dozen books. Is there one — other than the one you previously mentioned — that really stands out to you?
Adam: Yeah. The Art of Language Invention by David Peterson I’d definitely recommend. He’s the guy who created the languages in Game of Thrones and several other fictional languages featured in the Marvel cinematic universe and upcoming movie Dune.
He’s an expert in artificial languages, and he’s created this book on how to make your own constructed language. That was fascinating to me and that got me into trying to make my own languages. I also cannot emphasize enough how much The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth got me into the field. It’s terrific.
Eric: Adam, thank you so much. This has been great.
