Clare Bucknell’s LRB review of Louise Kennedy’s novel Trespasses (archived) begins thus:
Every morning, between reciting the Hail Mary and beginning their lessons, the children at St Dallan’s Catholic primary school near Belfast do ‘The News’. News, in this community, might mean many things: that someone’s father, perennially out of work for ‘kicking with the wrong foot’, has managed to find a job; that the pop group Mud has gone to number one with ‘Oh Boy’; or, more likely, that there’s been a murder, a beating, a car bomb, a riot, a high-profile trial.
I was puzzled by the unexplained idiom “kicking with the wrong foot,” so of course I googled, and Collins explained:
kick with the wrong foot
[…]
Scottish and Irish
to be of the opposite religion to that which is regarded as acceptable or to that of the person who is speaking
So I had learned something, but I also found this Notes and Queries page:
Why are Catholics sometimes called ‘left-footers’?
THE answer lies in the rich folklore of the humble spade – and provides a good illustration of the inadequacy of calling a spade ‘a spade’. The saying turns on a traditional distinction between left- and right-handed spades in Irish agriculture. It has been used as a figure of speech and often, sadly, as a term of abuse to distinguish Protestants from Catholics: ‘He digs with the wrong foot.’ Most types of digging spade in Britain and Ireland have foot-rests at the top of their blades; two-sided spades have foot-rests on each side of the shaft and socket, while an older style of one-sided spade had only one. Two-sided spades may well have been introduced by the Protestant ‘planters’ in the sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century specialised spade and shovel mills in the north of Ireland were producing vast numbers of two-sided spades which came to be universally used in Ulster and strongly identified with the province. One-sided spades with narrow blades and a foot-rest cut out of the side of the relatively larger wooden shaft continued in use in the south and west. The rural population of Gaelic Ireland retained the Catholic faith and tended also to retain the one-sided spade and ‘dig with the wrong foot’. In fact, the two-sided spade of Ulster was generally used with the left foot whereas the one-sided spade tended to be used with the right foot. Instinctively, the ‘wrong foot’ of the Catholics has come to be thought of as the left foot. The figure of speech has now been extended to kicking with the wrong foot.
Hugh Cheape, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Is there any truth to that quaint tale?
I don’t know about the story overall, but a quick google confirms my thought that it is not normal to call that part of a spade the “foot rest”, since it’s not for resting, but for pushing the spade into the ground with your foot. Instead, it’s typically labeled the “step.” Which does have me wondering about the reliability of the rest of the account.
[edited – using different terms in google suggests some people do call it a footrest. So now I just think people who do that are daft.]
Just to figure out the chronological setting that’s being suggested: the wonders of the internet are sufficient to give me grounds for believing it was in or about May of 1975 when Mud’s cover* of “Oh Boy” went to #1 on the charts in both the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland. Presumably many British/Irish readers of the novel, if of a certain age, wouldn’t need to google to know that.
*Americans will be more likely to know the original Buddy Holly version, since Mud never achieved commercial success on this side of the ocean.
As an addendum to the prior comment, here in the interests of Kultur is some vintage footage of the lads lip-synching their hit on West German tv in August ’75, wearing extremely naff stage outfits and trying some stage moves that seem either underchoreographed or underrehearsed or both.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsSN_Dvcfzk
It’s true that people can be described as kicking or digging with the wrong foot, that different styles of digging implement were used in different areas, some of which could only be used with a particular foot (e.g. https://www.faclair.com/ViewDictionaryEntry.aspx?ID=2FE559D80597E397B06F9120550322F8), and that more/less fertile (and therefore cultivated in different ways) probably roughly maps onto more Protestant/Catholic in Ireland.
Whether any of these things actually have to do with each other I don’t know – although I’ve heard that explanation before.
Thanks!
it’s typically labeled the “step.”
The names for the spade and the parts of the spade in Irish are discussed by Caoimhín Ó Danachair on p. 113–114 in this article. (Cluas ‘ear (of a spade)’ is already in Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, but I wonder if it is calqued on English.)
I knew “left-footer” = “Roman Catholic” as a child, but always assumed that it was something to do with football (in a Glaswegian context, not an unreasonable assumption), with the “left” just part of the usual sinister/unlucky/bad complex. (I didn’t actually know any Catholics; at our school you could be Presbyterian or – at a pinch – Jewish, and that was it, really.)
In Ireland the expression is well known, the putative explanation perhaps a little less so but probably widely believed. In the south, Catholics say the Protestants are the lefties — “lucht na coise clé” as I once overheard from someone underestimating my hearing and/or command of Irish. Perhaps spade preferences varied geographically as well as denominationally, but I suspect everyone would rather be right than left. “Digging with the wrong foot” is liable to opposite interpretations. A black cat can be good or bad luck depending on your superstition of choice.
Frank McNally of The Irish Times has been cited at LH before; a 2016 column has more information, citing some supporting observations from Emyr Estyn Evans’ Irish Folk Ways.
Over here, where people play football by using their foot to kick a ball, it is common knowledge that people are right- or left-footed the same way they’re right- or left-handed, and that most people are, uh, same-sided for both, meaning that most people are right-footed. So… I didn’t know one-sided spades even existed, but I expect them to be right-sided by default, with left-sided ones being custom exceptions, and “the two-sided spade of Ulster was generally used with the left foot” is not believable.
In the south, Catholics say the Protestants are the lefties
That seems to me to make the spade explanation something between untenable and superfluous (why bring spades into it at all, if there was never any real practical right/left correlation with the sectarian divide anyway?)
I must say that the whole thing reeks of folk etymologising to me.
To me as well.
The spades used to dig ‘turf’ (peat) are necessarily narrow. A (not very visible) demo here. The first thing you have to do is put the peat to dry, for which you need a narrow cross-section.
Then there’s not width to put two ‘shoulders’/steps on the spade: they have to operate with one foot. And I suppose manufacturers make them one way round only (like scissors).
I must say that the whole thing reeks of folk etymologising to me.
Yeah. Peat-cutting in Ireland would be more associated with the rural/Catholic South. So some slur about one-footed spades?
I would be modestly surprised (perhaps there’s a literature and perhaps I’m wrong) if those who prefer to kick a soccer ball with their right foot can actually kick the ball harder* with that foot versus just with more precision/control. That’s how it generally works with hands. I have no intuition as to which foot I would use to press down on a spade with, that being a task where precision/aim/fine-motor-control are not particularly relevant.
Note btw the long tradition (back to Greco-Roman times?) in military contexts like marching of stepping off with your left foot first. Explanations for why this is are varied and often sound akin to folk etymologies, but the practice is in some tension with “left = unlucky” as an exceptionless axiom.
*Or at least “harder” in a way that isn’t just an artifact of habit/practice, esp when there’s a several-step run before the actual kick where doing the set-up part with the sequence of legs switched may feel comparatively awkward without practice.
“the ‘wing’ or the ‘sail’ on the left or the right” about 5:10. “… never cut them too big”.
@JWB that being a task where precision/aim/fine-motor-control are not particularly relevant.
Not true for the turf: watch the vid, after 5:30 they go on at some length.
In cricket, there is a phenomenon where many of the best batters bat with their “wrong” hand – the opposite to what they write with. Of course, this is as much to do with the conventions of how batting is described, since you use both hands to hold the bat. The usual explanation as far as I understand is that what’s conventionally called your batting hand provides most of the power, while the leading hand (conventionally the less dominant hand) mainly provides direction. Those who have ended up batting the “wrong” way for whatever reason and are good enough to make it to a high level are generally the ones who are strong enough in their less dominant hand to get a lot of benefit from having their dominant hand in the leading position.
I am particular non-expert in shovelling, and use whichever foot seems convenient at the time.
Emyr Estyn Evans’ Irish Folk Ways
Thanks @mollymolly, behold the ‘loy’, a non-symmetric digging tool with a step for one foot only ” traditionally used for cultivating the potato.”
“anyone who still thinks that “calling a spade a spade” is synonymous with verbal simplicity should read Irish Folk Ways. ” says Frank McNally.
Llwy is “spoon” in Welsh.
Doesn’t seem to be cognate, unfortunately.
(“Spade” is rhaw, which seems to be cognate with Latin remus “oar”, which was borrowed into Brythonic and ended up as Welsh rhwyf. Life is confusing.)
i agree that the folk etymology is dubious on its face, but i don’t think DM’s point about footedness holds up too well as a critical lens on it. i’ve done a decent amount of digging with a spade, but not nearly as much as a 20-year-old farmer or peat-cutter, so i wouldn’t want to guess at whether a genuinely experienced person would rather use their dominant foot on the spade or on the ground. they’re different functions, but neither seems to me obviously more in need of strength or control than the other. i also wouldn’t rely too much on handed/footedness as a single character. autoanecdotally (and perhaps echoing JD) i can say that while i’m fairly righthanded, for one-handed bicycling i’m very much the opposite – i can confidently ride on anything short of deeply rutted turf or badly patchy cobblestone with my left hand alone, but with just my right hand i tend to waver even on smooth asphalt.
(I didn’t actually know any Catholics; at our school you could be Presbyterian or – at a pinch – Jewish, and that was it, really.)
I met my first Catholic in September, when I was 16. Her hair was long and black as [i won’t spoil it by listing the metaphors for black] and I fell in love with her.
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
The following has little, if anything, to do with linguistic wrong-footedness. Or does it?
I’ve been hybridizing daylilies for about half a century. That requires lots of spade work, to lift and line out clumps of cultivars. It’s also a necessity to give plants away. Why would one spoil a fine hobby by introducing commerce into its sharing?
Most of my many spades are quite narrow. They have lips, or shoulders, or whatever you like to call the part where the foot is placed to drive the implement into the soil. Aim is critical if one doesn’t want to destroy precious plants.
I am strongly rigt handed. Throws right, bats right, catches speeding fruit flies in his bare right hand. But, for reasons unexplored by medical science, digging is done with the left leg and foot. I can, in a pinch, drive a spade with my right foot, but it feels awkward.
If one were to say of me, ‘He digs with the wrong foot,’ I would smile agreeably.
Addendum- As to the name of the part where the foot goes, a posh UK garden tool purveyor has the following for a transplanting spade:
“ The mirror-polished stainless steel head gives rust resistance and clean movement through the soil. Wide comfort treads at the top of the blade prevent any discomfort for feet, allowing you to really dig deep – but without disturbing neighboring planting.”
Beware yuppies in the seedling beds.
Further to Jonathan D.’s comment, there’s a parallel phenomenon in baseball, where a number of good players who are otherwise right-handed are “left-handed” batters (as in cricket, both “right-handed” and “left-handed” batters have both hands on the bat and both hands/arms are used to make the swing effective). Some rather nerdy/technical speculation about why that might be here: https://www.theswingmechanic.com/blogs/baseball-swing/how-to-use-front-arm-dominance-to-rewire-your-swing
It seems intuitive to me to use the foot opposite to the hand which applies most of the force.
The rural population of Gaelic Ireland retained the Catholic faith and tended also to retain the one-sided spade and ‘dig with the wrong foot’. In fact, the two-sided spade of Ulster was generally used with the left foot whereas the one-sided spade tended to be used with the right foot. Instinctively, the ‘wrong foot’ of the Catholics has come to be thought of as the left foot.
So Catholics dig with the right foot, and Protestants dig with the left foot and as result Protestants think that Catholics dig with the left foot?:-/
Or it is rather Catholics dig with the right foot, so they approach salvation with the left one?
I like DM’s objections, but I, my freind and her husband take off our t-shirts in three different ways.
In related news, I learned from watching the winter Olympics that snowboarders who put their right foot in front are known as ‘goofy-footed.’ The same applies to surfboarders. I don’t know whether there is any correlation of goofiness with being left-handed or left-footed in other contexts.
And in other sports news, there are many switch hitters in baseball but AFAIK no equivalent in cricket. Is there are a law that says you have to bat the same way all the time? Most switch hitters are more effective from one side than the other, but gain an advantage when facing a pitcher of the opposite handedness. I would think the same principal would apply in cricket.
And in other other sports news, both Rafa Nadal and Phil Mickelson are naturally right-handed but adopted (for reasons I don’t know) a left-handed swing.
And now for the latest weather…
I would be modestly surprised (perhaps there’s a literature and perhaps I’m wrong) if those who prefer to kick a soccer ball with their right foot can actually kick the ball harder* with that foot versus just with more precision/control.
I am pretty sure that I can kick a ball harder (in the sense that the ball goes faster) with my right foot than with my left one, be it in a run or from a steady position.
*Or at least “harder” in a way that isn’t just an artifact of habit/practice, esp when there’s a several-step run before the actual kick where doing the set-up part with the sequence of legs switched may feel comparatively awkward without practice.
Well, there is always an element of practice in these things. The more we use a muscle, the stronger it gets. To abstract from habit or practice here makes sense perhaps for someone who never plays football so that the practice is zero. Otherwise there will always be some interference between more practice on the dominant side and therefore better coordination, but also probably more brute strength.
I play football with both my feet and am more balanced than most people, but still far from being symmetric. Also my right hand / arm is a bit stronger than my left one and even visibly a bit bigger (although not as much as to look like a crab). I thought that this was pretty normal.
Well, if the force is equal, people will generally prefer the side that gives them more precision & control. I haven’t kicked anything enough for asymmetric exercise effects to, uh, kick in, but I do all sorts of kicking with my right foot by default, and the right foot is also my default for a spade.
Oh, that depends on the soil.
I don’t use a spade every year, but when I do, it’s in loamy soil with stones in it. When one foot gets tired, I use the other; when neither is enough, I climb on the spade and jump up & down on it with both feet like I’m in a comic strip; but the default is the right one.
Links, zwo, drei, vier!
Yes, the left foot… and the right hand.
Unfortunately I don’t have a bike here in obscenely flat Berlin (I live too far from the museum), so I haven’t biked in a while, but I think it’s just the same for me. Right now, my left wrist feels more stable than the right one – perhaps precisely because the right one is used for (precise) movements and the left generally isn’t.
Only? 🙂 I take mine off in two different ways, and I’m aware of three others.
I climb on the spade and jump up & down on it with both feet like I’m in a comic strip
I have been there and done that!
“Only? 🙂 I take mine off in two different ways, ” – 1:0
“and I’m aware of three others.” – If your sample is larger than three, 1:1.
I have been there and done that!
Ah! Lutherans are (of course) both-footers!
…is that a consubstantiation joke?
I think it’s a joke about my people being stuck between the Catholicism they abandoned and the Reformation they couldn’t bring themselves to join. A foot in both camps, as it were.
A foot in both camps, as it were.
Entrambasaguas, as it were.
Entrambasaguas as it is.
Ah. Culture shock – in German-speaking lands the Reformation is almost equated with Luther. (Even though “Reformed Church” does mean “Calvinist”.)
@DavidL switch hitters in baseball but AFAIK no equivalent in cricket. Is there are a law that says you have to bat the same way all the time?
No there aren’t. And indeed there is a stroke called ‘reverse sweep’ (Ian Botham was noted for it in one sticky situation) where even as the ball is coming down the wicket you dance your feet, twist your hips, swizzle the bat in hand and play a mirror image of your usual sweep.
When one foot gets tired, I use the other; when neither is enough, I climb on the spade and jump up & down on it with both feet.
I alternate feet too, but if I can’t get through with one foot, it’s because the stones are too close to the surface of the glacial soil of eastern New York and New England, and if I used both feet I’d fall over. In that case I use one foot and carefully pry the stones loose.
Links, zwo, drei, vier
Various things, ranging from basic Hut, hoo, hree, hore to Léft … Léft … Hád a good jòb and I léft, where acute means “left foot” and grave means “right foot”.
As an undergrad at Marshall, I’d hear the ROTC cadets out the window: “Y’lailf! Y’lailf! Y’lailf raht lailf! Hunt, hoont, hreent, hornt, y’lailf raht lailf!”
My sheer guess is that one steps off with the left because the right leg is in control of the motion.
Rodger C says: “My sheer guess is that one steps off with the left because the right leg is in control of the motion.”
Apparently marching off with the left foot comes to us from the Romans. The left foot or the left side was associated with the god of war Mars.
Everywhere else the Romans entered with their right foot for good luck (through doors, over threshholds etc) except when marching off to war.
Also, I seem to remember that left was good when taking auspices (observing the flight of birds).
Long ago, in a military school, I was target-shooting with a 22 rifle with a scope. I am extremely right-handed; my left eye did better for this task. The instructor insisted I use only my right eye.
The right way, the wrong way, and the army way…
I paused at the last sentence of the following passage, from a book originally published in 1950:
Bare feet…
The instructor insisted I use only my right eye.
Here’s an 11-minute YouTube video explaining how to shoot a pistol or a rifle (with or with a red dot) if you are part of the 1/3 of the population who are cross-eye dominant, as you are. Apparently not a lot of firearms instructors know this; this guy is cross-eye dominant himself and presents several methods for each case.
On page 10 of the Louise Kennedy book being reviewed, which I happened to buy yesterday:
Where do you teach? he said. It was one of those questions that people asked when they wanted to know what foot you kicked with. What’s your name? What’s your surname? Where did you go to school? Where do you live?
And as I heard long ago from the Firesign Theater:
You ain’t got no friends on your left, that’s right
You ain’t got friends on your right, that’s left
Houngdog, one, two
Coondog, three, four
The only time I’ve heard this phrase was when I was young and visiting relatives in Ireland, my auntish said “he kicks with the wrong foot” in a very negative tone while explaining why we shouldn’t speak to a man who had greeted us in the street.
Until I saw this post I had always just assumed she was being homophobic!
I am particular non-expert in shovelling, and use whichever foot seems convenient at the time.
Much like the ancient Lilliputians in the far-off and distant times of prophecy, who were enjoined to break their eggs at the convenient end. Of course, the question then became, convenient for whom? And the holy wars (of extermination) were off and running.
As a child, I always wondered about this, since I break my eggs in the middle. But perhaps the prophet was talking about decapitating soft-boiled eggs. My mother’s egg-cups were shaped vaguely like asymmetrical sand-timers, with a depression at each end, presumably to accommodate both Big-Endians and Little-Endians.
The whole matter was recapitulated in the 20C with the invention of computers. In the First Age of Computing, when clanking iron dinosaurs ruled the earth, almost all computers were big-endian with the exception of the IBM 1620, which represented integers with arbitrary numbers of digits (later known as bignums) and actually had tables in memory to represent the results of single-digit addition and multiplication (if you overwrote them, the next person’s job would print the wrong answers, until the operators learned to reload the memory each time). This system was little-endian because it processed numbers a digit at a time from the right end, as we do today when computing by hand.
However, little-endianism was found to be more convenient overall with the invention first of the PDP-11 and then of the personal computer of more-than-eight-bit-splendor, and now it has driven the big-endians not indeed to Blefuscu but to certain niches: in the name of compatibility, binary numbers such as IP addresses are still transmitted over the Internet in big-endian order, and mainframes where they survive are big-endian, as they always have been.
The whole matter was recapitulated in the 20C with the invention of computers.
I never learned to use a computer as an egg-cup. I suppose there’s an app for everything.
@Y
With the new-fangled design and even exclusion of CD drives, most personal computers no longer provide a suitable interface for egg-eating or coffee/tea drinking, and the usef must seek third-party support.
Quite so. It must be a relief to tech support persons everywhere that they no longer get calls requesting repairs to their coffee-cup holders.
When teaching Swift I’d always picture the Lilliputians shouting, “The only Big-Endian is a Dead-Endian!” Usually to complete silence. The taste of the joke is of course questionable.
That would scare me too as a student if my professor had the PIN-PEN merger. I’d feel trapped between revulsion and a bad grade.
I trained myself out of the PIN-PEN merger as a tender youth. I suspect that to most of my students in E KY, they still sounded the same. I was at any rate being highly satirical about the jingoistic Lilliputians: “We’re #1! The only etc.!” Some of my students may have been revolted by my snarky attitude toward nationalist bellicosity.
When I first learned about Archimedes’* Cattle Problem and the history of attempts at solving it, I found it fascinating that, by using different methods, it was possible for researchers in the pre-computer age to calculate the answer systematically, either starting with most-significant digits of the 206,544-digit solution** or with the least-significant digits.
* Although the problem is generally attributed to Archimedes, there is nothing that actually connects him specifically to it, apart from its dialect and the fact that the cattle in question are said to live in Sicily. It could easily have been created by any other Doric-speaking mathematician in Magna Graecia (or elsewhere), but since Archimedes is by far the most famous of that ilk, he tends to attract attributions of interesting results. (For example, at least one ancient source attributed Heron’s Formula for the area of a triangle in terms of its sides to Archimedes, and Thomas Heath apparently believed that attribution—although certainly the oldest extant proof is Heron’s.) There are no ancient commentaries on the Cattle Problem to guide us, as it was only rediscovered discovered in the eighteenth century—by the literary scholar Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who also, as an outgrowth of his research into the literary and performance histories of classic plays, created what is now known as the profession of dramaturg.
—by the literary scholar Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
For a German, that sounds strange; here he is first and foremost known as a writer, especially of plays, some of which (Minna von Barnhelm, Nathan der Weise) are still well-known and frequently staged today. It’s a bit like introducing “the sonnet-writer William Shakespeare” or “the religious writer Isaac Newton”.
I suddenly got curious about the surname Lessing and looked it up: “Lessing is a German surname of Slavic origin, originally Lesnik meaning ‘woodman’.” The family “can be traced back to a Michil Lessigk mentioned in 1518 as being a linen weaver in Jahnsdorf near Chemnitz.”
@hans
My impression was that, like Shaw, Lessing began as a drama critic who decided to provide examples of good drama to show why the things he was reviewing were bad and how to make them better…. I agree it would be silly to refer to Shaw as “a famous music and theatre critic”.
I knew Lessing wrote plays of his own, but I confess that I know nothing about them in detail, except that (as PlasticPaddy says) Lessing was interested in writing scripts that could be useful examples for other writers and producers (in what had become a very hidebound era for the theater). I really only mentioned him though, because I thought it was interesting that the Cattle Problem was something he uncovered as a voracious scholarly reader of older literature, which is what I already mostly knew him fior.
I see I also marked another footnote in my post, which I then never wrote. However, I have no memory now of what I meant to comment on. In fact, I suspect that by the time I finished the first footnote I had already forgotten. (My comment was actually written in two pieces, about a day apart.)*
* My professional colleague and closest friend jokingly objects to it when I place whole sentences in parentheses, and he didn’t want me to write that way in one of our joint grant proposals. (If he saw that I occasionally place whole paragraphs in parentheses, he would probably fake a fainting spell.)
@JWB “Note btw the long tradition (back to Greco-Roman times?) in military contexts like marching of stepping off with your left foot first”
During the American Civil War:
Similarly, the drill sergeants repeatedly found that among the raw recruits there were men so abysmally untaught that they did not know left from right, and hence could not step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. To teach these lads how to march, the sergeants would tie a wisp of hay to the left foot and a wisp of straw to the right; then, setting the men to march, they would chant, “Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot”—and so on, until everybody had caught on. A common name for a green recruit in those days was “strawfoot.” (https://www.americanheritage.com/hayfoot-strawfoot).
-nik getting interpreted as -ing has a certain tradition in German. This even extends to -nica: I’ve been told the creek Liesing f. (!) in Vienna was a Lesnitzbach in more or less living memory.
Nathan der Weise is still taught in schools; its moral is “don’t be so sure your religious tradition is the original one, you don’t actually know”.
@M.: Ironically, the distinction between hay (harvested green and soft, so useful as fodder) and straw (cut dry and hard) is unknown to many urban speakers today. I think I only learned there was a crucial difference from the name “straw and hay” for a pasta dish with mixed plain and spinach noodles.
I probably imagined that hay was dried grass, so mostly blades/leaves (much thinner than they are wide), and straw was mostly stalks (vaguely cylindrical). But it’s easily possible that this is mistaken.
The hayfoot-strawfoot thing is also known in Russia, and indeed made it into Russian Wiktionary. I also wondered at some point what the distinction was – the joke certainly implies that they are supposed to be easy to tell apart!
In practice, one tends to harvest different kinds of grasses to produce hay and straw, but that’s not the fundamental distinction as I understand it. I recall reading a letter between two farming families in the early twentieth century, which mentioned that the writers were planning to leave one of their hay fields uncut in the summer and to use it for straw later Moreover, hay does not have to be grass at all; alfalfa hay is a common-but-slightly-higher-end form of fodder.
Hay = what you get from mowing a meadow, dried.
Straw = cereal stalks after the harvest.
Are straw and strew related? In Denmark you use strå to strø in stables, or more likely cut into shorter lengths when it becomes strøelse..
strøelse
Streusel
Kroonen has for PG:
*strawa- n. ‘straw’ – ON stra n. ‘id.’, OE strea(w) n. ‘id.’, E straw, OFri. stre
n. ‘id.’, WFri. strie n. ‘id.’, ODu. stro n. ‘id.’, Du. stro n. ‘id.’, OHG stro n. ‘id.’, G
Stroh n. ‘id.’ => *strou-o- (DRY).
A collective derived from *straujan- ‘to strew’ (q.v.)
Well, at least that helps us urbanites remember which one is straw, viz. the one that is strewn. Hay, in that case, is the one that is h’eaten.
The next question is what do strawberries have to do with straw?
I thought the ‘straw’ in ‘strawberries’ is well understood. (Can’t immediately find a supporting reference. And etymonline only speculates. So “well understood” seems a bold claim. [**])
1) They’re (the flowers/buds) very sensitive to frost, being so close to the ground, so packing straw under them is an insulation.
2) If the fruit rests on the (damp) soil, it’ll rot before swelling to the Frankensteinian proportions of modern cultivars, so the packed straw holds the stems off the ground/the berries can hang free of the ground.
I have picked strawberries in actual commercial fields, and seen the actual straw under them.
[**] There’s plenty of folk etymologies, including the above, on the web (esp. at Quora). Incl that it’s a corruption of ‘strew’ — as if the berries are strewn on the ground. Hmm.
OED: “One explanation refers the first element to straw, a particle of straw or chaff, a mote, describing the appearance of the achenes scattered over the surface of the strawberry; another view is that it designates the runners.” For the latter, it notes the usage of straw “extended to denote the stalks of certain other plants, chiefly pease and buckwheat.”
@Y “another view is that it designates the runners.”
In the first two photographs here https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/strawberry-plants.html, the runners indeed resemble pieces of straw.
I don’t know about the English, but up here people would pick wild strawberries and thread them on a stiff grass straw to enjoy later. I think I was taught how to do it by my mom, but I also remember threading strawberries with friends, guided by an older girl.
Threading strawberries is also the motive of a famous song by Alf Prøysen:
My translation:
the first two photographs here …
Show straw packed under the plants. (Looks like it might be pea-straw rather than grass/corn-straw [**].)
I’m not getting what you think are ‘runners’. The stalks from plant to berry? But ‘runners’ are outstretching roots, [ The botanical meaning “rooting stem of a plant” is from 1660s. ] or maybe tendrils to grab on to supports for climbing — as with raspberries.
Thanks for the photos. On the seventh row “Rows strawberry plants on a farm” there’s a wide shot of a whole field with straw packed between the rows — presumably to keep the weeds down (but see large weed in foreground). On the 19th row “Strawberries in a basket” the straw is very clear. Explicitly “straw” appears Page 2 middle “Straw between rows of strawberries. … covered with snow. Winter.” Page 5 middle “Strawberry plants in the garden on straw”; near the bottom a close-up “… growing on straw …”. Other wide shots show plastic sheeting between the rows. I’m suggesting the ‘straw-‘ name predates plastic sheeting.
[**] ‘corn’ in UK sense.
Ah, @M. did you mean to link to images of ‘Strawberry runners’?
(In which case double-thanks for the images showing straw straw.)
Horticultural alert: packing straw under the plants also keeps the slugs off during winter/stops them nibbling the green shoots in Spring/they don’t like slithering over all that dry aerated chaff. (The websites are calling it ‘straw mulch’; but I thought ‘mulch’ meant somewhat rotted/decaying — which would *attract* vermin??)
Botanical alert: (this half-remembered from Qi) most so-called garden “berries” are botanically not berries — which sensu strictu “has seeds and pulp (properly called “pericarp”) that develop from the ovary of a flower.” “bananas, pumpkins, avocados and cucumbers are” berries.
There’s a fact-check here claimedly *False* which I’d de-debunk as ‘not proven’. I note the total absence of any actual example usages. I note the prodigious hand-waving and appeal to Common Sense [**]. We sorely need the Polyglot Vegetarian to investigate.
Etymonline says the word is Middle English/Old English streawberige, streaberie. The earlier word was eorðberge, clearly Germanic.
@Y does OED give a date for streawberige‘s first usage?
Hypothesis: “strawberry” supplanted “eorðberge” precisely when/because of cultivation rather than gathering them from the wild.
Mulching is an “age-old” practice [Medieval at least] according to various sources written by horticulturalists, not etymologists — so not clear how old. It went out of fashion with the mechanisation of farming, and is now being re-discovered by organic growers.
[**] The last refuge of a scoundrel.
The Dictionary of Middle English gives 32 quotations, from c. 1125 onwards. For Old English, Bosworth-Toller gives 10 quotations, unfortunately not mentioning dates. One of them is from Wright’s dictionary, the source for the OED quotation. It comes from the 10th century vocabulary of bishop Ælfric.
The comment that I linked above already mentioned that “strawberry” was attested in Old English. In those times the word referred to the wild, or woodland, strawberry; there’s no record of cultivation until hundreds of years later, and the larger, commercially cultivated hybrid dates from the 1700s.
The OED also has a second OE quotation from a herbarium quoted in unrevised entries as Saxon Leechdoms (here’s the 19th-century edition). The OED3 declines to date anything more precisely than ‘OE’ (950-1100), but this book has also been thought to date from the mid-tenth century.
Eorþbergan has only a single surviving attestation, shown in the Toronto Dictionary of Old English (which hasn’t gotten to S yet): “fraga scilicet est terra fortis et inculta ł ofet, streabergan ł eorþbergan”, cited to the eleventh-century Harley Glossary. Nothing after that, which is why it’s not in the Middle English Dictionary or the OED.
If I understand correctly, Bosworth-Toller’s 10 quotations for streáw-berige are all from the same two books cited by the OED, and what they call “Wright’s dictionary” was the 19th-century edition of what’s now called the Harley Glossary.
The suggested origins in the OED are unrevised from the first edition (1919), but nothing more definitive has been discovered since then. The practice of threading wild strawberries on a straw has also been proposed as an explanation, but nobody knows if that was actually done in pre-Conquest England.
In Swedish, the garden variety is jordgubb, the wild one (vesca) is smultron; both words may be home grown. Danish is with German: jordbær for all of Fragaria L.
(Threads never die department: Smultron may share a root with Schmalz, Sw smult. But why?)
I thought ‘mulch’ meant somewhat rotted/decaying
Not necessarily. Wikt’s definition is “Any material used to cover the top layer of soil to protect, insulate, or decorate it, or to discourage weeds or retain moisture”, which is pretty generic. As a child, I helped plant rhubarb (Rheum sp.) in an organic garden: the mulch consisted of large black plastic bags with slits cut through them for the plants. Etymologically mulch is ‘soft’ > ‘sweet’ > ‘honey’, cf. μέλι, mel.
Further note on the herbarium: it’s an Old English translation of an older Latin text, the herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius, which was widely circulated in Europe. So both OE sources say English “strawberry” = Latin fraga (which is in Virgil, Ovid, and Pliny; there are no known references to strawberries in Ancient Greek texts).
For about a thousand years — 10th century to 19th century — English speakers were using the word “strawberry” without leaving any written record that anyone ever noticed that it contained the word “straw”, or wondered why; evidently it had become opaque. All of the etymological attempts come from the 19th century or later.
@AntC. Ah, @M. did you mean to link to images of ‘Strawberry runners’?
Yes. My mistake.
The Roman had a neurotic relationship to strawberries.
Hence fragile minds.
Edit: Also strawberry runners.
Trond wins the thread.
Wild strawberries are familiar, threading them on anything is not.
what they call “Wright’s dictionary” was the 19th-century edition of what’s now called the Harley Glossary.
Wright is a collection of Old English vocabularies. B-T refers to the 1857 edition, the OED to the 1884 one. The former contains 15 vocabularies, the latter 20.
Y, thanks for the correction; so B-T is citing ten separate manuscripts, i.e. ten witnesses to OE strawberry, is that right? The Harley Glossary is just one of them.
I didn’t recognize “ofet” in “ofet, streabergan ł eorþbergan” at first: turns out it’s the OE ancestor of ovest, whose OED revision was celebrated by Language Hat in 2005. It meant ‘fruit’ in Old English; the OED cites a couple of other glossaries that translate Latin fraga generically as “obet”, rather than more specifically as strawberry.
Obst, obvs. But my old anglitude is even more lacking than my latinity, so I’d never have guessed.
“ofet” … Obst, obvs.
What the fuck is up with people dropping letters from the end of their words? Well, here penultimately.
…but in the English version the s is fake and in the German version the t is (compare Axt, Saft, jemand/niemand). Mustache-twirling exquisiteness.