Scottish Food Words: Celebrating Robert Burns

Robert Burns Day, otherwise known as Burns Night, honors the birthday of Scottish poet, or makar, Robert Burns. Lovers of Burns, Scots poetry, and haggis gather together every January 25 to celebrate with a Burns supper, which involves a toast to the lassies, a recitation of Burns’ poetry, and the ingesting and imbibing of many Scottish eats and drinks.

For the first course, you may start with some cockieleekie, “soup made of a cock or other fowl boiled with leeks,” or Scotch broth, “a thick soup made from beef or mutton with vegetables and pearl barley.” Afterward is the “entrance of the haggis,” at which time bagpipes (or zampognas, gaidas, cornemuses, or loures) play some music, such as a pibroch, “a wild, irregular kind of music, peculiar to the Scottish Highlands, performed upon the bagpipe.” The word pibroch comes from the Scottish Gaelic piobaireachd, “pipe music,” which ultimately comes from the Latin pipare, “to chirp or peep.”

Just so you know what you’re in for, haggis is “a dish made of a sheep’s heart, lungs, and liver, minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, salt, and pepper, and boiled in a bag, usually the stomach of a sheep.” The origin of this word is unknown. It may come the Old French agace, “magpie,” playing on the idea “of the odds and ends the bird collects,” and the odds and ends in the dish. Another possible origin is the Middle English hagese, which may be related to haggen, “to chop.” Haggen also gives us haggle, perhaps with the idea of “hacking or chopping” prices.

Haggis

Haggis by tjmwatson on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by tjmwatson]

Along with haggis, Burns supper diners might also have some neeps, otherwise known as the rutabaga, the Swedish turnip, or the swede, and which “originated as a cross between the cabbage and the turnip.” The word neep may be a corruption of “new turnips.” Don’t forget your potatoes or tatties, which presumably comes from the -tat- of potato (see tater), or perhaps some clapshot, “a traditional Scottish dish comprised of boiled potatoes and boiled swede (or Scottish turnip) mashed together with chives.”

Haggis, Neeps and Tatties!

Haggis, Neeps and Tatties! by tjmwatson, on Flickr

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by tjmwatson]

While the origin of the word clapshot is unknown, World Wide Words speculates it may be similar to that of the Irish dish colcannon, a dish of “mashed potatoes and cabbage, seasoned with butter,” which was “pounded together in a mortar,” and “that vegetables such as spinach were formerly pounded with a cannon-ball,” hence, the cannon of colcannon. Col is derived from cole, or cabbage (see coleslaw). Clapshot may imply the clap or loud and sudden noise of a cannonball shot.

You may end the evening with some cranachan, “a traditional Scottish dessert made with whipped cream, whisky, oatmeal, honey, and raspberries.” The word is Gaelic in origin and originally referred to a kind of churn or “beaten milk.” A similar British dessert is syllabub.

Of course no Burns Night would be complete without Scotch whisky (otherwise known as usquebaugh, Gaelic for “water of life”), whether a dram, a tappit-hen, or a quaich. Too much usquebaugh? Try the Irn-Bru, a “fizzy orange-gold drink” touted as the Scottish hangover cure, or a few rounds of the Highland Fling, “one of the oldest of the Highland dances that originated in the Gaelic Highlands of Scotland,” and an ancient Scottish cure.

According to the Porridge Lady, to prevent a hangover before a ceilidh (from the Old Irish célide, “visit”) or a gilvarage (perhaps a combination of gild and ravage), have some crowdie.

And remember: we warned you about the haggis.

Tolkien and the Bestiarium of Fantasy

We’re celebrating science fiction words and language all week at Wordnik. Today in honor of J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday, we’re excited to have a guest post from Peter Gilliver, associate editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary.


It is one thing to invent a word and give it life in some specific context; it is quite another to launch it successfully into the mainstream of language. The former is perhaps particularly easy in science fiction and fantasy, where there are new and invented worlds in which new and invented things must be called by their names, but often the exotic nature of the setting ensures that the new name remains confined to its original context. Sometimes a novel concept takes the fancy of other writers, and reappears in their writings under the same name; only rarely does it have enough universal appeal to break out into general circulation, as with H. G. Wells’s time machine and Karel Čapek’s robot (and Isaac Asimov’s robotics).

Perhaps science fiction has the advantage over fantasy here: scientific or technological developments may give reality, or at least real-world meaning, to the originally speculative concept of a science fiction author, whereas the world evoked by a fantasy author is often deliberately removed from reality, its features too intrinsically ‘other’ to be readily transplanted into a non-fantastical context. In our exploration of J. R. R. Tolkien’s distinctive contribution to the lexicon of English, The Ring of Words (2006), I and my co-authors observed how some distinctively Tolkienian words have been taken up by other writers, such as waybread by Ursula Le Guin, or pipeweed by Terry Pratchett. Writers may use one of ‘his’ words when more familiar alternatives are readily available: when Dianna Wynne Jones wrote ‘confusticate Mrs Sharp!’ in Charmed Life, for example, her choice of confusticate rather than confound or bother was surely a tribute (conscious or unconscious) to Tolkien’s use of this rare word in The Hobbit. Such tributes and echoes reflect Tolkien’s pervasive influence.

The names of the creatures of Middle-earth are something of a special case. Some of Tolkien’s distinctive usages in this category have joined the common currency of fantasy: for example, the average fantasy reader (or writer, or role-player) would know what a barrow-wight was even in a non-Tolkienian context. This is not, in fact, Tolkien’s coinage—barrow-wights are to be found in the writings of William Morris and Andrew Lang—but he certainly brought it to a wider public.

Several others of his creatures owe their names to Tolkien’s characteristic philological tendency: that of imagining what role an obsolete or cognate word would have had if it were still in use in modern English. Knowing, for example, that ent had been an Old English word for some (unspecified) kind of giant, Tolkien found it a handy name for the particular kind of tree-giant that he found himself writing about in The Lord of the Rings. Similarly, when he needed a name for a particularly evil and powerful kind of wolf, he could draw on Old Norse (in which the word vargr meant both ‘outlaw’ and ‘wolf’) and Middle High German (in which the related warc was a kind of monster) to come up with warg.

And then, of course, there is orc: a word of uncertain origins which by the nineteenth century—insofar as it survived at all—was simply one of many scarcely-differentiated words for nasty creatures, used to pad out lists such as that in Charles Kingsley’s historical novel Hereward: ‘things unspeakable,—dragons, giants, rocs, orcs, witch-whales, griffins, chimeras, [etc.]’. Tolkien needed a word for a particular kind of goblin-like creature, and he wasn’t happy with hobgoblin, imp, kobold, or with goblin itself. He settled instead on orc, both for what he called ‘its phonetic suitability’ and for its connection with Old English orc ‘demon’, and also adapted the word for his invented Elvish languages. The concept developed in his imagination over the decades to provide the archetypal bad guys of Middle-earth, not to mention many other fantasy milieux.

Arguably even more significant, however, than all the creatures which Tolkien added to the bestiarium of fantasy—including Balrogs, Woses, wraiths, and many others, not to mention hobbit, perhaps the most successful of all—is the effect his writings have had on two of the most important pre-existing creature-names: dwarf and, especially, elf. Tolkien’s dwarves draw heavily on Northern legend and so are perhaps not especially innovative, but they are more thoroughly characterized than most of their predecessors. He even managed to bring about a shift in spelling: dwarves, the plural form that he preferred, is now more common when referring to these creatures (though dwarfs persists in other contexts, such as astronomy).

Tolkien also played a major part in the radical transformation of the meaning of elf. The earliest elves mentioned in English texts were supernatural beings with fearsome powers, which they most commonly used for evil purposes; but by the time of Shakespeare they had declined in fearsomeness—and indeed in size—to diminutive, whimsical creatures, little different from fairies. Tolkien was unhappy with this diminished conception, and to the ‘faery’ people of his poems and legends—something like humans, but somehow greater, more ‘high’—after experimenting with various other words (including fairy) he gave the name elf, and the word has never been the same since.

Attention all muggles and squibs!

Unless you’ve been locked up in Azkaban all summer, you’ll know that the very last Harry Potter movie opens today.  We at Wordnik love the JK Rowling series, and not just because of the magic and butterbeer.

“The Harry Potter books,” writes Jessy Randall in this essay from VERBATIM, “are not just good literature but a treasury of wordplay and invention,” and we couldn’t agree more.

There are the Latin-based spells. Reducio, which reduces the size of an object, notes Randall, comes from the Latin reducere (re- “back” + ducere “bring, lead”).  Some more examples from Randall:

Reparo! (Latin reparare) repairs. Riddikulus! (Latin ridiculus) turns an enemy— usually a Boggart—into something ridiculous or laughable. Lumos! (Latin lumen, ‘light’) causes illumination. Impedimenta! (Latin impedimentum) impedes or slows the enemy. Sonorus! (Latin sonor, ‘sound;’ English sonorous) causes one’s wand to become a microphone. Stupefy! (Latin stupefacere, stupere, ‘to be stunned’) stupefies the enemy, causing confusion. Expelliarmus! (Latin expellere, ‘to drive out’) expels your opponent’s wand from his or her hand.

Many of Rowling’s terms are also common words with other meanings. While a muggle is known in the Potterverse as “a person who has no magical abilities,” it also once meant “a contest between drinkers to decide which of them can drink the most,” and also referred to a marijuana cigarette, hot chocolate, and “to be restless; to remove, deface or destroy a geocache.” A squib is the unmagical offspring of magical parents but also “a small firework that is intended to spew sparks rather than explode; a short piece of writty writing; an unimportant, paltry, or mean-spirited person.”

Characters’ names are often also common words.  A dumbledore is a bumblebee.  Snape is a ship-building term that means “to bevel the end of (a timber or plank) so that it will fit accurately upon an inclined surface.” Hagrid is the past participle of hagride, which means “to harass or torment by dread or nightmares.”  Skeeter is a term for an annoying pest, and not just Rita Skeeter, blood-sucking journalist.  Mundungus is “waste animal product” or “poor-quality tobacco with a foul, rancid, or putrid smell,” a good name for a sneaky thief.

If you’re interested in all the words of Harry Potter, you’re in luck: we have Potterlists here, and here, and here, and here.  If you love all things magical, check out It’s Magic! and -Mancy, which list different kinds of -mency and -mancy words, or divinations. This one is about extrasensory individuals, including sibyl, “an old woman professing to be a prophetess or fortune-teller; a sorceress,” and the namesake of Sybill Trelawney, Hogwarts’ professor of divination. Also don’t forget spells, spellcasters, and amulets.

Whatever your fancy, bring your wands and remember, in the words of Hermione Granger, it’s wingardium levi-O-sa!

[Photo: In Flex We Trust]

Happy Bloomsday!

Every June 16, James Joyce fans everywhere celebrate the Irish writer’s mammoth tome, Ulysses.

Serialized from 1918 to 1920, Ulysses was first published in its entirety in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, who started Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Deemed “obscene” due to a passage that included the main character, Leopold Bloom (for whom the holiday is named), masturbating, Ulysses was banned in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom till the 1930s.

Bloomsday began in 1954 “on the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, when John Ryan (artist, critic, publican and founder of Envoy magazine) and the novelist Flann O’Brien organised what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route.”  Now 57 years later, Ulyssean festivities are still going strong.

The little bookshop that started it all is displaying artwork from artist Stephen Crowe’s “Wake in Progress, his ongoing project to illustrate every page of [another Joyce novel] Finnegans Wake.” In Dublin and New York, Joyceans celebrated with Bloomsday breakfasts. Broadway is putting on a daylong, celebrity-studded marathon reading, while tweeps are attempting to tweet all 256,000 words of Ulysses in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, author Frank Delaney is deconstructing one line of Ulysses a day; photographer Motoko Fujita put together a book of Joyce-inspired photographs; and Rory McCann, an Irish software developer, created an algorithm to solve the Ulyssean riddle, can you cross Dublin without passing a pub? (The short answer: yes but it’s not easy.)

Feeling less ambitious? You can see the what, where and when of 16th June 1904, as well as just the where.  Or if you’ve always wondered what the entire text of Ulysses translated in 2D barcodes looks like, you’re in luck. Of course we at Wordnik aren’t empty-handed – we have lists for this, Ulysses, Ulyssean, and Joycean.  And with the end of the Ulysses copyright next year, who knows what will happen (Bloomsday flash mob, anyone?).

Whatever you decide to do (or not do), you have 365 days to read, or re-read, the novel for next Bloomsday.  Or you can watch the movie.  We won’t tell.

75 Years Later, Joyce Obscene Again

Every Bloomsday for the past 27 years Symphony Space has done a program of readings from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and every year those performances have been broadcast on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York.

Tonight, though, according to The New York Times, WBAI will be parting ways with Symphony Space due to “apprehension about obscenity and government regulation.” Symphony Space will be reading the racy* “Ithica” episode, while WBAI will be playing it safe with other passages.

This immediately got my Irish up: how dare our government censor great literature! Then I read the article more closely, and it doesn’t actually say anything about government censorship. Symphony Space and WBAI censored themselves “to avoid concerns at the radio station about some of Joyce’s words and descriptions.”

How gutless! In 1933 a federal judge ruled that Ulysses was safe for public consumption, and what was deemed acceptable then has to be infinitely more so in this lurid age, when hair-palmed teenagers have so many better options for making themselves blind. It’s disappointing that Symphony Space and WBAI lack the courage of their convictions. The government rarely displays either**, but you expect more of great cultural institutions.

That said, I bet they both put on a good show. Genteel readers can listen to the family-friendly WBAI production, while you pornographers out there can enjoy the Symphony Space slimefest.

* Kidding. It’s not half as racy as this.

** Though it makes me think maybe the Bush administration might be right after all that industry can regulate its own CO2 emissions. If the culture industry can do such a good job regulating itself, why not coal-fired power plants?

Who owns quodpot?

I’ve been following the court battle between J. K . Rowling/Warner Brothers and the owner of The Harry Potter Lexicon with mixed feelings. My first thought was that the idea that words can be owned by anyone is ridiculous.

But when the words in question are all original works, it changes the equation. And the fact that Rowling has hitherto been so open and supportive of Potter fans and some derivative works puts her in a different category than your typical litigious big media company. I’m inclined to think she should be the final arbiter of who presents Potter content, in any form.

The nearest analogy I can think of is the Star Wars universe, which contains books, movies, and many other derivative works, and which is tightly controlled by Lucas and his minions.

This raises the question of who owns all the content on Wordie. I never bothered to write terms of service, because they just seem dumb. No one reads them, and in the few instances of abuse that have arisen, I’ve used technical solutions, like blocking IP addresses, rather than legal ones. I did consider having a TOS which, in the small print, gave all rights to all content to Bill Shatner, or perhaps Abe Vigoda, and may do that retroactively. Thoughts?