Which Food-Related Terms Were Cut From the OED?

When an editor allegedly cut dozens of words from the OED, the English language lost some unusual food-related terms, including ghetchoo and milk sociable

By Michael Y. Park

November 27, 2012

Image may contain Drink Juice Milkshake Milk Smoothie and Beverage

Between 1972 and 1983, Robert Burchfield, the New Zealand-born editor of the Oxford English Dictionary--arguably the Bible, Magna Carta, and Larousse Gastronomique of our language all rolled up into one--took out his sharpest editorial knife and trimmed the fat from the tome. The "fat" being words he deemed too "foreign" for his tastes, according to a new book.

In Words of the World, linguist Sarah Ogilvie alleges that Burchfield deleted thousands of entries, many of them Americanisms, then blamed previous editors.

"This is really shocking. If a word gets into the OED, it never leaves. If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it never leaves," Ogilvie told the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Not surprisingly, plenty of the expunged words were food-related.

Or at least seem to be. Because the dude axed them, and we don't have a copy of the 1933 OED lying around here, we can't know for sure quite yet.

Here are a few of the ones that were nixed...

An Oxford University Press spokeswoman pointed out that some of the words that Ogilvie lists among the deleted were actually revived in later editions of the OED. We found a number of them.

bake-kettle a heavy cast-iron cooking pot that hung over the fireplace and was used to bake bread, pies, etc. box-stew a stew of box oysters (whatever those are!) cabbage land Actually, "cabbage land" does show up in the online version of the OED, where it means, you guessed it, a field for growing cabbages

calabazilla a wild squash of Mexico and California
chestnutting an Americanism for picking chestnuts (this one's back in too)
chicken-eater American term for the peregrine falcon

chicken-thief American term for Spanish and French trading boats on the Mississippi in the early 19th century (this term is in the OED Online now, but as "a petty thief, a pilferer")

dairy a general U.S. term for dairy produce (e.g., from 1882 Narraganset: "Farmers used to sell their dairy in the Boston Market.")

ear-corn a cob of corn

ghetchoo an aquatic plant with edible roots

gourd fiddle Yep, it's a fiddle made from a gourd

milk sociable Milk sociables were (and are) unassuming get-togethers where you abstain from the evils of carbonated beverages and talk about how fine and dandy the autumn colors are looking. If you didn't already know that, you need to visit your grandmother more. (Or read the OED Online--it's back in.)

milk-and-molasses an early 19th-century expression for a person of mixed black and white parentage (also restored to the OED)

milk-sickness Milk sickness was the term for when you were poisoned by drinking the milk of a cow that has eaten a toxic weed known as white snakeroot. Fun fact: Milk sickness killed Abraham Lincoln's mother. (Back in the OED, without the old-fashioned hyphenation.) seed-cake a cake of compressed seeds used as cattle feed (The online OED only includes the definition for the British treat for human consumption.)

sheller a shellfish, a crab ("Sheller" is in the online OED currently, but this particular definition isn't.)

sours pickles

swaly
Technically, it means "swampy," according to Ogilvie (or "shady," according to the online OED), but we prefer urbandictionary.com's definition: "to be totally fucking awesome and Baked at the same time," kind of like the compost cookie at Milk Bar, right?

"There were thousands of food and drink terms from outside Britain which the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put in the dictionary. As you could imagine most of these came from Europe (aperitif, goulash, macedoine, mille-feuille) but more surprising are the ones from outside Europe: chang (Tibetan), chicle (Nahautl), hulwa (Urdu), kai (Maori), haanepoot (Afrikaans), sambal (Malay) to mention just a few," Ogilvie writes in an e-mail. "This is surprising because up until my book, the general consensus has been that the early editors kept out foreign words and World Englishes, but this seems to be a myth started by Robert Burchfield in the early 1970s, and perpetuated by journalists and scholars ever since."

Oxford University Pressspokeswoman Nicola Burton said that when Burchfield omitted words in the new editions, he did so because of space constraints, not xenophobia. "In many cases, the word is still clearly only of marginal importance; in a few cases the word has subsequently proved to be less ephemeral than Robert Burchfield thought," she wrote in an e-mail. "Making such judgments is always difficult: In 1903, the editors of the first edition of the OED famously decided not to include an entry for the very new word 'radium,' an omission which they were able to make good in the 1933 Supplement."

And as for the missing words Ogilvie has brought to light? The OED staff is re-evaluating them all.

Which is just scrumptastic*.

* not actually a word