Category: L
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Lentil
If you have less than perfect eyesight, you probably have, at this very moment, two lentils perched on either side of your nose—at least you do in so far as the English word lens is a direct adoption of the Latin word lens, meaning lentil. Lens was adopted by seventeenth century opticians because the convex…
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Lemonade
The ade in lemonade is not there because the drink comes to your “aid” when you are parched. Rather, it is a suffix meaning produced from, and was first used to form the name of a beverage in the late fourteenth century when pomade appeared, a drink made from “pommes,” or what we now call…
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Lemon
Closely related to each other as species, the lemon and the lime also derive their names from the same source: the Arabic limah, meaning lime. This Arabic word entered French as lime, which was then adopted by English in the early seventeenth century. Limah also, however, gave rise to another Arabic word, limun, which the…
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Leftovers
Before leftovers were called leftovers they were called relics, and before they were called relics they were called relief. Historically, these words overlapped very little: relief appeared around the beginning of the fourteenth century and is last recorded, as a culinary term, in 1589; relic is first recorded in 1576 and became rare, as a…
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Leek
Because the ancient Romans believed that eating leeks gave a person a clear, strong voice, the emperor Nero, famous for fiddling while Rome burned, is said to have consumed leek soup everyday so that his speeches could be heard far and wide. However, whereas Nero would have called this onionlike plant a porrum, the English…
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Lazy susan
The revolving platforms that sit in the centre of a dinner table and confer on guests the godlike power of spinning distant dainties into an orbit closer to their own plates have been known as lazy Susans since about 1917. The name is whimsical in origin, alluding to how the device obviates the need for…
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Lagniappe
A lagniappe is a bonus, a gift, a freebie. It’s a kind of reverse gratuity which the customer receives rather than bestows, similar to the tradition of the baker’s dozen, whereby a customer gets thirteen items after having paid for twelve. Lagniappe arose as the Louisiana French spelling of the the American Spanish phrase la…
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Lager
The relatives of lager, a name bestowed on a light beer that is brewed with only a small amount of hops, are curious and farflung. They range from lie, to ledge, to lair, to lees, to Utter, to fellow, to law. All of these words evolved from an Indo-European source pronounced something like legh, which…
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Lytic infection
A viral infection in which the final act of the infection is to lyse (i.e., burst, or destroy) the cell. This then releases the new (progeny) viruses so they can go on to infect other cells. After a virus invades a cell, new viruses are produced that break open the cell, releasing the viruses.
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Lyse
To rupture a membrane (cell). The act of lysis (rupturing a membrane).