Since starting with a sharp-flavored stab in the dark at the etymology of the phrase "in a pickle," the Eat Your Words column has hummed along pretty nicely and covered a lot of ground, from the basics like bread and corn up to the wonkier heights of basil and arugula. But there are two biggies with interesting backstories that I'd feel remiss in missing before bouncing from Bon Appétit: food and meal.
First, food: As you might be able to guess from its long vowels and fuddy-duddy consonants (imagine Conan the Barbarian yelling it), it's a word we picked up from the Germanic side of the language tree, as a North Sea modification of an old Germanic verb, fodjan, that meant "to feed." Where "food" gets interesting, though, is in its wayback Proto-Indo-European roots, where it's believed to come from the same root as the ancient Greek pateisthai ("to feed"), Latin panis ("bread") and pastor ("shepherd," though more literally, "feeder"), and with that words like "pasture," "fodder,"and "foster." There's no epic mythology to a word so basic, and no considerable change throughout the English-speaking centuries (though until the 1300s, "meat" and "food" meant pretty much the same thing), but knowing that "food," "bread," and nurturing (à la nourriture) words like "foster" all come from the same root is the kind of historical rhyming that makes etymology worth noodling around with. And if you feel like getting real nerdy, you should read up on Grimm's Law (as in one of the Brothers Grimm), the linguistic rule that explains how Latin and Greek words that start with a P ended up in German with an F (plus other interesting sound change stuff).
Now, it's time for meal. Which itself originally just meant "time." Even though the words have ended up sounding the same today, and seem to have to do with similar topics, the "meal" of a word like "cornmeal" and the "meal" that we sit down to at dinnertime each day ultimately come from a totally different word in Frisian, the language of the coastal Vikings who ended up invading England and inventing English. The ground-up-grain root is mele, and meant pretty much the same thing (ground-up grains). But the lunch/brunch/dinner root is mēl (with a long E, for you phonics heads out there), and even in its early days in English just meant "an occasion" or "a particular time." Over the centuries, "meal" came to first mean that special occasion at which you sit down and eat, and then came to mean any eating session at all.
But going even further back, to languages like Old Swedish and Old Icelandic, it meant "time" more generally, or even just "measures" or "markings." And in some even older Germanic languages like Gothic, the same word meant "writing." And the OED thinks that it might ultimately be linked to the same root as the ancient Greek melas, meaning "black."
Which, as a food writer on my last day, makes "meal" a pretty perfect last word. I could wax poetic about fading to black, food as language, and language as food, but by now, you probably get the picture. Bon appétit!
