runcible spoon

In 1871, Edward Lear, a Victorian artist and author, wrote a book of nonsense verse that included this passage from a poem called "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat": "They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon." Over the next twenty years, other runcible items appeared in Lear's poetry, including a runcible goose, a runcible cat, a runcible hat, a runcible wall, and one more runcible spoon. In all these poems, the meaning of the word "runcible" is unknown: Lear invented it out of thin air simply because he liked the sound of it. In the early twentieth century, however, someone bestowed the word upon an actual piece of cutlery used to serve appetizers--a spoon whose bowl ends in three curved prongs, the last of which has a cutting edge.

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:
mezzaluna
fletcherize
abligurition
cornucopia
banyan day
spurtle
appetite
plague-water
nym
spork