Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Cupcake
Although you might suppose that cupcakes take their name from being little cups of cake, this is likely not the case. When cupcakes were given their name in the early nineteenth century, they were not referred to in the plural as cupcakes, but rather in the singular as cup cake; in other words, you made…
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Cupboard love
Cupboard love is love pretended to the cook in the hopes that a meal or snack will result. Although the strategy has been exploited since the invention of the cookie jar, the term itself did not emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century. This practice of feigning affection was also known in the eighteenth…
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Cupboard
No one has pronounced the p in cupboard since the sixteenth century, which slightly obscures the fact that in origin the word is actually cup board, a board for cups. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this origin was in fact even harder to see, as common spellings of the word ranged from cubberd to…
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Cup
Often the shortest words have the most complex histories, as is the case with cup. In origin, cup can be traced back to an Indo-European word pronounced something like kaup and meaning round container. In Sanskrit, kaup became kupas, meaning hole, while in Greek it became kupe, meaning ship, and in Latin it became cupa,…
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Cucumber
If you were to eat a two-pound cucumber, you would ingest only an ounce of actual “cuke” material; the rest of it—96%, in fact—would be water. The name of this moist fruit derives from the Greek kukuon, which evolved into the Latin cucumis. Accordingly, when English adopted this Latin word in the late fourteenth century,…
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Crust
Five hundred years ago, the mark of a skilful baker was the ability to make a pie or loaf of bread with a hard, shell-like crust; refrigeration and plastic bags had not been invented yet, so a thick, tough crust prevented bugs from burrowing in, and kept the inside from drying out. It is not…
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Crumpet
Many foods made from fried dough, such as crepes and crullers, get their name from words that mean curled since the action of cooking them makes them crinkle, bend, fold, and twist. The crumpet is another such food, having derived its name from a fourteenth-century term, crompid cake, literally meaning curled cake. Crompid, in turn,…
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Crumb
In the fifteenth century, the word crumb meant the part of a loaf of bread that is not the crust; recipes calling for bread often instructed the cook to slice the crust from the loaf and use only the crumb. The word crumb, however, is older than this particular usage, dating back to the tenth…
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Cruller
In 1809, American author Washington Irving published a book called A History of New York, ostensibly written by one Diedrich Knickerbocker, an imaginary Dutch immigrant. Nine years later, in 1818, Irving introduced the word cruller to the English language when he briefly mentioned the curly pastry in his Legend of Sleepy Hollow. That Irving both…
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Crock pot
Like the last clause in this sentence, the term crock pot is redundant because crock means pot, and pot means crock. This sense of crock is still evident in the old-fashioned phrase crock of gold, now heard only in conjunction with leprechauns and rainbows. The word crock, which in the mid eighteenth century gave rise…
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