flummery

People who are not from Wales have great difficulty reproducing certain Welsh consonants; as a result, the Welsh word llymru was rendered into English not only as "flummery" but also as "thlummery," the latter most easily said after a trip to the dentist. "Flummery," of course, prevailed over "thlummery" and from the early seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century the word referred, like the original Welsh term, to a sour jelly made by boiling oatmeal with the husks. In the mid eighteenth century, "flummery" also developed two new meanings: it became the name of a sweet dish made of milk, flour, and eggs, and simultaneously it came to mean "empty praise" or "gibberish." In this, flummery underwent the reverse development of the word "trifle," whose original sense was "idle tale" but which also came to denote a dish of sponge-cake and cream.

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