‘A Fish Out of Water’ The Origins and Meaning of The Food we Speak

I have got an interesting book set, a set has three books inside and each book has a different topic but the main idea is similar, about the origins and meaning of the words or phrases and idioms or expressions. The book that I am holding named ‘A Fish Out of Water’ – the origins and meaning of the food we speak. The other books, I can’t remember what their name are, because I don’t have them now. I gave Zine and Lookpud to borrow them last term. But I vaguely remember that they are about ‘the Sodier’ and ‘the People’, maybe, because I remember that they talked about the war ship ‘Armada’ and the famous President of America ‘Teddy Bears or Theodore Roosevelt’

‘A Fish Out of Water’ is only about the food, everything that put the food in words or phrases or else from A-Z. I will show some familiar words that everybody will be amazing after they have known their origins.

ADAM’S APPLE

To doctors, the protuberance in the front of the human throat, which is particularly prominent in men, is formed by the thyroid cartilage. Before the advent of modern medical science, folklore held that it was formed when a piece of the forbidden fruit (an apple), which Adam had eaten in the Garden of Eden, stuck in his throat.

BARBECUE

When Christopher Columbus led his first expedition to the Caribbean in 1492, he and his men encountered many new practices and customs. One of these was the method of cooking meat and fish on a frame work of sticks and posts above a fire. The local word for this type of cooking was barbacoa, which that first Spanish expedition brought back to Europe when they returned. By the seventeenth century ‘barbecue’ had entered the English language and in due course the device on which food could be cooked outdoors was extended in meaning to include the social occasion at which such food was served.

BIG APPLE

New York City has been officially known as ‘the Big Apple’ for nearly thirty years, although the name was being applied to New York, along with several other large US cities, as long ago as the 1920s. One explanation rests on a jazz nightclub called the ‘Big Apple’, which was popular in the 1930s. Another puts forward the idea that the city’s nickname stemmed from a popular dance called the Big Apple. Whatever the explanation, it probably lies in the nightclub or dance hall, where musicians hired to play in New York in the 1920s and 1930s knew that they had reached ‘the big time’.

CHEESECAKE

In slang this is the female counterpart of ‘beefcake’: photographs of glamorous young women displaying their physical attractions before the camera. The term dates from the 1930s, though why ‘cheesecake’ should have been chosen as an appropriate description remains unclear. Perhaps the light, soft consistency of ‘cheesecake’ was deemed an appropriate analogy by men who bought the cards in the belief that the models pictured were ‘light’ and ‘soft’ themselves? Perhaps ‘cheesecake’ was a suitable companion to ‘cupcake’, another word given by male admirers to an attractive woman.

HALF A LOAF IS BETTER THAT NO BREAD

There are many proverbs urging us to make the best of out lot and this one was quoted by John Heywood in his Dialogue of Proverbs in 1546. The meaning is plainly that if you can’t get all that you want, you should try to be content with what you do manage to get; after all, something is better than nothing.

I HAVE EGGS ON THE SPIT

Cooking eggs on a spit was a particularly time-consuming process in medieval cookery which required the cook’s constant attention. First the eggs had to be boiled, then the yolks were removed to be mixed with spices, before being replaced inside the whites. Following this, they were fed onto a spit and roasted over the fire. With so much to attend to, the cook had no time for anything else, which gave rise to the current use of the expression; ‘I have eggs on the spit’ means ‘I am too busy to do anything else’.

SALAD DAYS

William Shakespeare is credited with coining this phrase, which he gave to Cleopatra in lines spoken by her right at the end of Act One of Antony and Cleopatra,

My salad days

When I was green in judgement, cold in blood

To say as I said then.

The ‘salad days’ referred to by the Queen of Egypt was the period earlier in her life when she had an affair with Julius Caesar, before she and Mark Antony fell in love. From Shakespeare, the phrase has become widely used to describe days of youth and inexperience. Julian Slade borrowed it for his popular 1954 musical, Salad Days.

TALKING TURKEY

This expression originated in America when it was in common usage by the middle of the nineteenth century, before spreading throughout the English-speaking world. ‘Talking turkey’ means ‘talking business’, or ‘talking seriously’. It appears to date from the early days of the colonies, when turkeys formed an important part of the trade between the Indians and the Pilgrim Fathers. Before long the Indians realized that every trading visit would involve their supplying turkeys and ‘You come to talk turkey?’ became a familiar saying whenever a colonist appeared to discuss business.