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

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.

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.

livelong

8 July 2015

Livelong is not a common adjective. Its use, for the most part, is restricted to one expression, all the livelong day, although as late as the nineteenth century the livelong night was also common. In these expressions the word is simply an intensified version of the adjective long. But why live-? We don’t use that word to intensify anything else.

Well, the word goes back to the first half of the fifteenth century. Livelong is first recorded in Henry Lovelich’s poem The History of the Holy Grail, found in the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 80:

And thus vppon the yl stood Nasciens there Al the live long day In this Manere.
(And thus upon the hill stood the nations there all the livelong day in this manere.

And

Al that leve longe Nyht Into the Se he loked forth Ryht
(All that livelong night he looked directly into the sea.)

Lovelich probably penned the poem around 1410. The manuscript dates from before 1450. And the date provides us with a clue for why live- is used in the word.

The live- in livelong does not refer to living. Instead, it’s from the Old English leof, meaning dear, beloved. It shares a common Germanic root with the Old English lufu, or love.

There is a less common use of livelong to mean for a lifetime or lifelong. This sense appears in the late eighteenth century and would appear to be the result of a misanalysis of the word’s origin.

---

Sources:

“livelong, adj.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, September 2009.

“leve-long (adj.).” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

“love, n1.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, March 2008.

laneway

29 June 2017

Image of a Toronto laneway, by Old York Guy, 2015, licensed under Creative Commons license

Sometimes you don’t notice dialectal terms until you move away from the region. After having lived in Toronto for six years and then having moved on to Texas, I have just noticed the term laneway. In current use it refers to a back alley running behind urban homes and is found chiefly in Ireland, Canada, and Australia.

The redundant term appears to have originated in Ireland, where it is attested to as early as 1858. A reprint of a Dublin newspaper article appears in a Montreal paper in 1873, but the earliest known fully Canadian citation is from 1888. In Irish and early Canadian use, laneway simply denoted a narrow road or street—a lane—but in twentieth-century Canada the term narrowed in meaning to refer to a back alley. From the Toronto Star, 2 November 1923:

Juryman: “Do you know if this is a laneway or a street?” Mr Murphy: “It is a laneway, and has not been opened as a street. Application has been made.”

There are also the terms laneway house or laneway housing, which are chiefly found in Toronto and Vancouver. Laneway houses are smaller homes built on back alleys in an effort to provide more housing and alleviate a shortage of rental units in those cities. The first laneway house was built in 1989, but the term isn’t attested until 1997. From The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 23 August 1997:

BUILDING a house with the front door on the back lane may not be up everyone’s alley. But for those hardy souls who want to build affordable yet unique dwellings in Toronto’s saturated core, a coach house or laneway house may be the only practical option.

Sources:

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition, October 2016, s. v. laneway, laneway house.