Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Slow cooked...and the origin of boob

I turned on my slow cooker loaded up with lamb and vegetables before I left for work this morning. I was half-expecting to come home and find it still uncooked because there was no light to indicate that the thing was actually turned on.

But when I walked through the door tonight I was met with the aroma of cooking lamb. Yay! The meat fell off the bone when I served it. It was tasty, but not as delicious as the slow-cooked lamb shoulder I ate at Society. I'll keep working on it (perhaps I have set my standards too high...).

I have started reading The Superior Person's Second Book of Words. It's also very amusing and enjoyable and, like The Etymologicon (Oh, glorious Etymologicon! I miss you!), it's terribly English, but I suppose that's fitting for a book about English words. I'll write a post with my favourite words when I'm finished it, but one of my favourites from last night's chapter was 'booboisie' (pronounced like bourgeoisie), a word coined by H L Mencken to refer to the "stupid masses". 

I wonder how 'boob' came to refer to a breast, but also to a foolish person? I wonder which came first? Dictionary.com suggests boob in the foolish person sense dates back to around 1600 as "pooby" (hee!) - "apparently [a] blend of poop - to befool (now obsolete) - and baby".  Booby for breast is, however, an Americanism which emerged in the 1930s (possibly from "bubby") and then was shortened to boob in the 1940s. Don't say my blog is not educational. 

I also have to write a post about the wonders of The Etymologicon, but as there was something that tickled my brain on nearly every page, I'm not sure how to condense it down to a blog post. But I'll try. 

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