Category: F
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Frankenfood
In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to allow American companies to market genetically modified foods. That decision prompted Paul Lewis, an English professor at Boston College, to write a letter to the New York Times in which he decried what he called Frankenfood, an innovation as misguided (in Lewis’ view) as Frankenstein’s…
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Frangipani
In the sixteenth century, the custom of the baissemain—that is, greeting a superior by kissing her hand—was still common in French aristocratic circles. For Muzio Frangipani, an Italian marquis living in Paris, the one drawback of this quaint custom was that the fingers of his French acquaintances did not smell as sweetly as they might.…
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Flummery
People who are not from Wales have great difficulty reproducing certain Welsh consonants; as a result, the Welsh word llymru was rendered into English not only as flummery but also as Mummery, the latter most easily said after a trip to the dentist. Flummery, of course, prevailed over Mummery and from the early seventeenth to…
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Flour
The poet John Keats died in the flower of his youth; Sir Lancelot was the flower of chivalry; Shakespeare’s plays are the flower of English drama. This use of flower to mean the blossom or best part of something is where flour—the best part of the grain after it has been milled and sifted—gets its…
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Fletcherize
“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate” was one of the catchy slogans invented by Horace Fletcher, a self-styled dietician who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convinced thousands of people to chew each mouthful of food thirty-two times, a number partly determined by most people having thirty-two teeth. This was not Fletcher’s…
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Flesh-monger
Before they were known as butchers, people who sold cuts of meat were called flesh-mongers, a term first recorded in the eleventh century. The monger part of this word, still current in terms such as fish-monger or war-monger, derives from the Latin mango, which is what the ancient Romans called someone who traded goods for…
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Flap-dragon
The resilience of the human alimentary canal is evidenced by our ability to swallow liquids that are so potent they’re capable of bursting into flames. Brandy for example, will catch fire almost as easily as kerosene. In the late sixteenth century, this property was incorporated into a drinking game called flap-dragon: raisins were dropped into…
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Fixin’s
Fixin’s are the savoury adjuncts that accompany both grub and vittles: fixin’s include condiments such as ketchup and relish, but they may also extend to gravy, salad dressing, and black-eyed peas, all of which help to turn a mere heap o’ food into a fine spread. In use since the early nineteenth century; the word…
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Fish
Although the origins of the names of individual fish species are often uncertain, the origin of the word fish itself is quite clear. Fish ultimately derives from an Indo-European word pronounced something like piskos. This word entered the Germanic family of languages as fiskaz, which became the Old English word fisc, which by the thirteenth…
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Filet mignon
The mignon part of filet mignon, the name of a choice cut of beef, is a French word meaning dainty or delicate. The term filet mignon did not appear in English until the early twentieth century, but mignon itself was adopted in the early sixteenth century as minion, the name of a dainty and delicate…