cornucopia

A cornucopia is literally a horn of plenty, deriving as it does from the Latin cornu, meaning "horn," and copia, meaning "abundance" or "a copious amount." Overflowing with fruits and vegetables, the cornucopia is still a common sight at Thanksgiving, although the original goat's horn, a symbol of the nanny-goat that nursed the god Zeus when he was an infant, is now usually replaced by a horn made of straw. The "corn" of "cornucopia" is in no way related to the grain "corn," but it is related to the "corn" in "unicorn" (a one-horned beast), to the "corn" in "Capricorn" (the horned goat of astrology), to the "corn" caused by too-tight shoes (a horn-like protuberance), to the "corn" in "corner" (an angle sticking out like a horn), to the "corn" in "cornet" (a pastry shaped like a horn), and to the "corn" in "Cornish pastry" ("Cornish" comes from the English county called "Cornwall," and "Cornwall" evolved from "Corn-Welsh," so-called because the county sticks out into the sea like a horn).

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 teaches English and Learning Technologies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

previous orts:
banyan day
spurtle
appetite
plague-water
nym
spork