Speaker: Judith Tschann

Redlands, California 

BIO

Judith Tschann is Professor Emerita at the University of Redlands, where she has taught a variety of courses in language and literature, including History of the English Language. She received a Mortarboard Professor of the Year Award and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and has lectured and written for both academic and popular audiences. Judith is the author of the book “Romaine Wasn’t Built in a Day.”
She lives in Redlands, California, with her husband.

TALK DESCRIPTION

Food-word etymology illustrates many linguistic facts: that every language changes over time, that language is bound up with culture and history, and that language has a ludic or playful quality. The study of food words shows that English has absorbed words from hundreds of languages around the world. Studying food and language together also reveals how we may define ourselves in relation to food, and how and why we use conventional food-metaphor expressions (like “buttering up”) to describe human behavior.

This presentation—with time for Q&A—considers the beginnings of English in the fifth century CE, the flood of new food words during Middle English times, the effects of trade, travel, and colonialism on vocabulary and diets of Early Modern English-speakers, and the great variety of new food words coming into Modern English, including bibimbap, burrito, hummus, pho, wonton, and many more.

Since studying etymology also means enjoying the playful aspect of language, we’ll note amusing literal meanings, like vermicelli, “little worms,” and pumpernickel, “farting Nicholas”; hidden food meanings as in seersucker, from Persian for “milk and sugar”; false but fun etymologies, such as barbeque supposedly deriving from “beard to tail”; and food stories, like goats discovering coffee.