The Hindu Business Line : Skilligalee, boiled baby and slush fund

Scores of species are vanishing — of butterflies and corals, birds and big cats. Along with them, many words in our vocabulary too, are slowly disappearing. For instance, `off-the-peg' lost out to `ready-to-wear', and airport replaced aerodrome. "We now speak of the radio rather than the wireless; bosoms seem endangered through the bold emergence of... "

With great fondness, Michael Quinion tries to catalogue hodgepodge of such words in Gallimaufry (www.oxfordbookstore.com) . He begins with `messes in pots', on a food-y note. "The names of most ancient pottages are now unfamiliar, such as porray." Possibly made from leeks, because the Latin origin purrum means vegetable; but the word is confused with the French purée and so became `a general word for all sorts of thick broths,' frets Quinion.

Another chapter lists spice names gone out of wider use. "Take zedoary from Bengal, whose name was often corrupted in English to setwall. It's a close relative of turmeric, popular in medieval Europe but later replaced by ginger. It was sometimes added to wine as a flavouring, but nobody much below the rank of king could afford to do so, it being rare and expensive."

Skilligalee means `any insipid beverage', like `a thin oatmeal gruel or porridge'. Boiled baby was `a suet pudding', and figgy-dowdy meant `a type of plum pudding'.

Slush funds, as you know, are what `resourceful' netas are flush with. Slush was `a mass of semi-liquid fat' that came as a result of `boiling up the unappetising salt port and salt beef,' informs the book. On ships, they stored slush in tubs and used the material `to grease tackle blocks, running rigging, and the like'.

It was a perk for the ship's cook to sell what remained of slush - `some to members of the crew for frying biscuit or the occasional fresh-caught fish, the rest to tallow chandlers in port for making candles'. And the proceeds were supposed to be `paid into a slush fund to pay for small luxuries for the crew'.

Quinion devotes a chapter to `the parlance of physicians'. Many of their terms have vanished from everyday life, as have the curatives they referred to, he rues. The phrase `all-heal' in the Hippocratic Oath, one learns, is the exact English equivalent of Panacea, the daughter of {lsqb}sculapius, the Roman god of healing. "Her name comes from Greek panakes, all-healing." Clyster is an archaic word for today's enema. "It's from Greek kluster, a syringe, from kluzein, to wash out."

Skipping `diseases and conditions,' let's play `games with cards' and acquaint ourselves with words such as whist (`the most prestigious game'), ombre (`a game for three people'), and loo (short for lanterloo, a disreputable gambling game `because the pot could quickly grow to very large sizes and bankrupt unwary players').

Words have their own strange ways; it is not unusual to find instances of technology changing but not the language.

"We still dial a telephone number, though virtually all of us have phones with push-buttons; people still hang up at the end of a call... Workers in television still speak of filming an item and of footage, although the technology is now almost entirely electronic."

Wish we brought some of the old words back into circulation.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in