nym

If you glance through a fourteenth-century cookbook, you will see many strange words, but one will appear more than any other. That word is "nym," meaning "take," and it was used in Middle English sentences like this-"Nym a pond of ris, seth hem fort it berste"-a sentence that actually means this-"Take a pound of rice and boil it till it swells." Because "nym" was used so often, essentially every time the cook was instructed to take a new ingredient, fourteenth-century recipes came to be known as nyms. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the culinary "nym" had all but vanished, having been replaced by the current idiom, "take," as in "take two onions and dice them." At the beginning of the seventeenth century "nym" did manage a comeback, but not as term within cookbooks; instead, "nym"-which was now spelt "nim"-came to mean "take" in the sense of "steal"; the word was even used as a noun to mean "a pickpocket." "Nim" itself is now defunct, but a related form lives on: "nimble," which originally referred to a person's ability to take or apprehend something quickly.

mark morton is the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (Insomniac Press, 2004). His most recent books are The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp through the Language of Love and Sex and The End: Closing Words for a Milennium. He teaches English literature at the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

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