"vocabulary" news and stories

Anu Garg's new book, "The Dord, The Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-so-common Words" combines two of my favorite things: food and etymology. Bibliophiles might know Garg from Wordsmith, his 600,000-subscriber word-a-day e-mail system.

Now, while the book isn't entirely about food, Garg, a vegan, devotes one entire chapter to the meaning behind food words (gourmand, by the way, comes from the word gormant, which means glutton - share that one at your next dinner party!)

Some other fun word origins? 'Calzone' means 'trouser leg,' 'taco' means 'plug' or 'wad' (ew), and a 'trencherman' is a hearty eater. Hey - what about us trencherwomen? Check out the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's review of the book for more.

So, next time you're gathered postprandial, use this book as fodder in your conversation about aristology to impress your guests.

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I have a new internet game addiction and it has the quirky benefit of being somewhat food related. You see, I've always been a sucker for words (it's part of why I like this whole writing thing) and when a friend sent me a link to Free Rice a couple of weeks ago, I thought to myself, "gee, that sounds sort of cool." I navigated over and started to play and loved the fact that it pushed my brain a little while also giving me the opportunity to donate rice to the United Nations in order to help end world hunger.

I realize that it sounds sort of crazy to think that playing a vocabulary game on the internet could do anything to help stop hunger, but they make money through advertising revenue and so the longer you are on their page and reloading the site as you play, the more dough they make off their ads. So go challenge your brain and donate some rice to the UN.

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Last weekend, The Washington Post featured an article about the movement toward dumbing down recipes to meet the skills of home cooks in the U.S. Words like dredge, saute, blanch, fold and cream have left the vocabulary of many would-be cooks and, as a result, such words appear less frequently in recipes from the likes of Kraft Foods and The Joy of Cooking. (A new edition of the latter will include a glossary of cooking terms.) The WaPo article cites some particularly funny anecdotes by General Mills, Inc. chairman Stephen W. Sanger, who spoke of emails and calls from confused home cooks. One wondered if they could substitute peaches for eggs, another started a fire by literally greasing the bottom of a pan before putting it in the oven.