poutine / pudding

14 April 2016

Poutine is a contender for the Canadian national dish, although whether or not it can unseat Kraft Dinner (i.e., Kraft macaroni and cheese) in overall popularity is questionable. But the origins of both the dish and its name are shrouded in mystery, and its pedigree is not that long.

Image of poutine

Image of poutine

Poutine is a dish of French fries covered in gravy and cheese curds. Well-made poutine is both delicious and artery-hardening. Originating in Quebec, it is widely available across Canada, even being served in fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Burger King—although many would argue that what is served in these chain restaurants does not qualify as poutine.

It has been claimed that a dish named poutine and consisting of fries and cheese curds, sans gravy, was first served in Warwick, Quebec by Fernand Lachance in 1957. Lachance allegedly added gravy to the mix in 1964. But evidence for this claim, as well as for the numerous other origin stories, is lacking. The earliest documentary evidence for the dish and its name is from 1978 in Canadian French and 1982 in English. Similar mixes of fries, gravy, and cheese have popped up from time to time in various locations, but the key differentiator in the Canadian dish is the use of cheese curds, not ordinary cheese.

The word poutine in reference to other dishes is older, though, and like the dish itself, the origin is a bit mysterious. There are two leading contenders, and one probably apocryphal origin. Quebecois have been using the word to refer to various desserts, or puddings, since at least 1810.

As a result, one line of thinking is that it is either a variant of the French pouding or a direct borrowing and alteration into Canadian French from the English pudding. The standard French pouding is itself a borrowing from pudding, which in turn is a borrowing from the Norman French bodeyn or bodin, meaning entrails or sausage. (The sausage sense is preserved in English in such dishes as blood pudding.) A direct borrowing from English, however, seems less likely as there is no explanation for a shift from the d to the t.

A second possibility is that poutine is a Quebecois term, originally meaning a mess, and then shifting in meaning as a result of its similarity to pouding or pudding. This explanation ties in with the story of its inventor being Lachance, who allegedly replied when a customer asked for fries and cheese curds, “ça va faire une maudite poutine” ("it will make a damned mess"). The problem with this explanation is there is no evidence of such a Quebecois usage meaning mess.

Sources:

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary Online Edition, 2000–06, s. v. bodins, bodeins.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, third edition, December 2006, s. v. poutine, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, third edition, September 2007, s. v. pudding, n.

Wikipedia, 11 April 2016, s. v. Poutine.

Oregon

13 August 2007

The name Oregon is of uncertain origin. Other than being of Native American origin and being first applied to the Oregon River, now known as the Columbia River, little is certain.

The name first appears in a 1765 petition to King George III by Robert Rogers, a colonial military officer. Rogers refers to the Ouragon River, saying it is an Indian name for the famed, but yet-to-be-seen-by-Europeans river of the west that would come to be known as the Columbia River. The name could be from the Connecticut-English pidgin word wauregan, meaning beautiful.

The name Oregon appears in print in Jonathan Carver’s 1778 Travels through the Interior Part of North America and William Cullen Bryant uses the name in his 1817 poem Thanatopsis:

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there!

Bryant’s poem made the name famous and indirectly led to the naming of the territory and eventually the state.

An alternative hypothesis for the origin appears in a 1944 article in American Speech where it is postulated that the name comes from ouraconsint. The name appears on a French map from sometime before 1709 and the name is split into two lines, with -sint appearing below, giving the impression to a casual reader that the river’s name is ouracon. The river in question is the Wisconsin River, commonly called the Ouisconsing by the French. According to this hypothesis English explorers like Rogers confused the name with a river further to the west.

Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, Oregon, n., 3rd Edition, June 2008.

William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” in Songs of Three Centuries, ed. John Greenleaf Whittier (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1817), 188.

George R. Stewart, “The Source of the Name Oregon,” American Speech 19, no. 2 (Apr 1944): 115-17.

OK Boomer

16 November 2019

The meme is sweeping the internet, but where did it originate?

Ok Boomer is a dismissive reply by a young person directed at a Baby Boomer. It is rather disrespectful of their elders, but after years of being blamed for not getting “real” jobs when the only available ones are at Starbucks or driving for Uber, being blamed for not buying houses while being saddled with crippling, student-loan debt, being blamed for the demise of various and sundry industries because they spend what little money they have on avocado toast, for being selfish and self-absorbed while dying on foreign battlefields in the longest wars in America’s history, which were, incidentally, started by Baby Boomers, can one really fault Millennials for being dismissive? In two words, OK Boomer sums up the sentiment that Boomers have been a privileged and coddled generation who never faced tough times like today’s younger generations are facing and are thus out of touch and not worth listening to.

(Full disclosure: I’m a Boomer. But having been born in 1963, at the tail-end of the generation, I identify more with Gen Xers.)

Like most such memes and slang, finding the exact origin is impossible. The earliest usage I’ve been able to find, however, is from 5 Sep 2019 on a gaming discussion board:

“Ok Boomer”

Whatever you say :D

*Next time though, there’s a “Reply” button in the bottom right corner on a forum post, for example, this one. Use it so we know for sure who you’re talking to! (Unless for some reason you can’t click on a simple button but act so big on a forum post)*

Undoubtedly, someone used OK Boomer before this date, but we’ll never know who or exactly when.

Sources:

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), 2019.

Sammymom. ”Woop Woop.” Hypixel, 5 September 2019.

Urban Dictionary, 17 September 2019.

notorious

1 November 2013

Usage manuals like to point out that notorious refers to someone or something of unfavorable reputation and that the word should not be used to mean merely famous or notable. While this is true to an extent, like many questions of usage the answer is more complicated, and in fact few writers actually use the word mistakenly.

Notorius is a Medieval Latin word meaning “famous, well-known,” and when it was originally adopted into English it carried this value-neutral sense. Notorious isn’t recorded in English until the 1530s, but the adverb notoriously appears several decades earlier, around 1495, and since adjectives generally predate their adverbial forms it is believed that the adjective is at least this old.

Very quickly, however, the word started being associated with fame of an unsavory or infamous nature. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer, for example, uses the phrase “notorious synners.” It was from oft-heard uses like this that notorious acquired its unsavory reputation. But the sense of notorious with neutral, or even favorable, connotations did not go away and remains in use today. There is, however, a subtlety in its use.

When used to describe a person or persons, notorious carries the negative or infamous connotation, even if it is used humorously or in a mildly deprecating fashion, as when, for instance, in his diary of 20 September 1945, Harry Truman describes himself as a “notorious person,” clearly using the word self-deprecatingly to dispel the aura of fame and importance created by the presidency, and not simply to mean “famous” and certainly not to seriously hint that he was some kind of criminal.

But when used to describe things or situations, notorious can have the neutral meaning of simply noted or famous. It can be pejorative, but such connotation has to be derived from the context and not simply from the word itself. Thus you get descriptions of “notorious dance marathons” of the 1920s or of E=mc2 as a “notorious equation.”

Most writers and native speakers of English understand this subtle distinction, even if it is only a tacit understanding, and will seldom use notorious incorrectly.

Sources:

“notorious, adj.1 and adv,” “notoriously, adv.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2003.

“notorious,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, 668–69.

nones

7 February 2020

In recent years, there have been many news reports touting the fact that the fastest growing religious group in the United States is the nones. Who are the nones? And when did we start using the term?

The nones are people who are not affiliated with any organized religion. The group includes atheists and agnostics, but it also includes those who are “spiritual but not religious,” people who believe in a God or gods or an eternal soul but who don’t ascribe to a faith tradition that has a label. The term has become rather common in recent years, but it was coined over fifty years ago.

None dates to at least 1967 when it was used in a paper by sociologist Glenn M. Vernon. The paper was published the following year, but it apparently circulated in mimeograph form before its formal publication. The paper is titled The Religious “Nones”: A Neglected Category and says of the term:

In fact, the label “No religion” is used in the 1957 U. S. Census and by some researchers to identify those who do not belong to a formal church. By way of contrast, the social scientist classifies as “independent” those who do not report affiliation with a particular political party. The use of the “independent” label suggests that the lack of political party affiliation does not mean that one is apolitical or has no political convictions. He is still viewed as a political person. Perhaps this is because the act of voting serves as the primary validation of political participation. There is no comparable religious phenomenon, no clearly recognized religious behavior other than membership, attendance, or other identification with a formal religious group. Thus, “none” is used in religious research, designating no religious affiliation, but also adding the gratuitous implication of a nonreligious person.

And he says of the nones:

Frequently included under this label are atheists, agnostics, those with “no preference,” those with no affiliation, and also members of small groups and others who, for one reason or another, do not fall within the classification scheme being used and who more properly belong in a residual or “other” category.

Vernon also uses nones in a second 1968 paper, “Marital Characteristics of Religious Independents.” This paper is actually published a few months before the one above, but it references the 1967, mimeographed version of that paper, so this second paper was clearly written later despite the earlier publication date. In this second paper he writes:

When the sociologist of religion reports his research, he at times includes a somewhat residual category of “none” under which is frequently included such diverse individuals as atheists, agnostics, those with “no preference,” those with “no affiliation” as well as practicing and/or believing “nones"—those without affiliation who engage in ritual behavior and/or accept premises incorporated in the beliefs of the affiliated religionists. These are the “religious nones” to which previous attention has been called.

Despite the wording, I’ve found no evidence in the sources he cites of anyone else using the term nones. The “previous attention” is a reference to the mimeographed version of his first paper. The word none had been used in surveys as a possible response when asking the question of religious affiliation prior to Vernon’s two articles, but they did not use it as a noun labeling a category of religious (non-)affiliation. While this is hardly ironclad evidence that he coined the term, it seems probable that he did.

None of the above has anything to do with the Christian liturgical term none (or nones), which has an entirely different origin. The liturgical term is borrowed from Latin and French and is reference to the ninth hour of the day or the prayers that were to be offered at that hour, from the Latin nona. This nones roughly corresponds to 3 pm, the ninth hour of daylight.

Sources:

I’d like to thank Garson O’Toole of the Quote Investigator website and Peter Reitan for assistance in my research on this term.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2003, s.v. none, n. and nones, n.3.

Vernon, Glenn M. “The Religious ‘Nones’: A Neglected Category.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 7.2, Autumn 1968, 219–29.

Vernon, Glenn M. “Marital Characteristics of Religious Independents.” Review of Religious Research, 9.3, Spring 1968, 162–70.