banyan day

A day on which no meat is served is called a "banyan day," a term first used by British sailors in the mid eighteenth century to denote those days of the week when, to conserve rations, they were fed only bread and gruel. Banyan days take their name from an Indian class called the Banians, whose religion teaches them to esteem all life and therefore to abstain from eating meat. For centuries, under India's system of castes, Banians could work only as merchants, and in fact the ultimate source of their name-vaniyo-is the Gujarati word for "merchant caste," Gujarati being a language spoken in western India. Because many Banians moved to Arabic ports to conduct their trade, vaniyo was adopted by their Arabic counterparts, who modified the Gujarati word to banian. The word banian was then adopted by Portuguese traders, who introduced the name of the caste to English at the end of the sixteenth century.

what is an ort?

an ort was originally a scrap of food or leftover fodder not eaten by cattle or pigs. The word then came to be applied to leftovers from the kitchen table, leftovers that were also known as relief or relics. Ort appeared in the mid fifteenth century as a compound of the prefix oor, meaning not, and etan, meaning to eat; quite literally, therefore, orts are the uneaten scraps of a meal.

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 Millennium. He teachesÝEnglish and Learning Technologies at the University ofÝWaterloo in Canada.

previous orts:
spurtle
appetite
plague-water
nym
spork