10 Years After

The Chemicals Between Us

I had a discussion the other night about tortillas and cheese dip, which I referred to it as con queso. Oh, how could I not know that it was chili con queso and that simply con queso made no sense since that would mean "with cheese"?! To my defense I argued that a lot of naems for food do not make sense. I recalled having read that shrimp scampi literally means "shrimp shrimp" since scampi is Italian for shrimp.

While trying to search Google for more information on Custer's pet pelican I found some interesting bits of trivia from a page I came across:

* Kielbasa, a smoked sausage of coarsely chopped beef and pork, and flavored with garlic and spices, is from the Polish word Kielbasa, the word for sausage. Kielbasa sausage literally means "sausage sausage."

More or less unrelated to the discussion at hand, but interesting in a general sense to language:

* Kenbei is an anti-American sentiment coined in the 1990s by the Japanese, and literally means "hate America."
* The medical term for snow blindness is "chionablepsia."
* The word "hurricane" is derived from the name of the West Indian god of storms, Huracan.
* It was the custom among men in Rome, when swearing to tell the truth, to place one's right hand on one's testicles. The English word "testimony" is related to this custom.
* The word "pajamas" has its origin in Persian. It is a combination of the Persian words pa (leg) and jamah (garment).
* During an eclipse of the sun in 1868, spectral lines were located that were attributed to an unknown element that was called "helium," from the Greek word for "sun." Thirty years later, helium was discovered on Earth.
* 'Hoosier,' Indiana's state nickname came from a generic Southern word, meaning bumpkin or backwoodsman.
* The adjective "sesquipedalian" defines itself: it is used to describe the use of very long, or multi-syllabic, words.
* The word "bozo" derives from the French slang term "bouseaux" (meaning "hick, peasant, or yokel"). However, bouseaux literally means "cow turds."
* The musical term "honky tonk" comes from black slang for "gin mill" - later it was used to describe spirited music that thrived in such places in the 1930s.
* "Lobster shift" is a colloquial term for the night shift of a newspaper staff.
* The raccoon derives its name from the Indian word meaning "he who scratches with his hands."
* A pig is a hog but a hog is not a pig. "Hog" is a generic name for all swine. Per hog-raising terminology, a pig is a baby hog less than ten weeks old.
* The British term "swipes" is a slang expression meaning weak or inferior beer.
* The Greeks had a word that meant "with armpits smelling like a he-goat."

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From American Heritage Dictionary:

Kielbasa - A spicy smoked Polish sausage.
ETYMOLOGY: Polish kiebasa, from East and West Slavic *kûlbasa, from East Turkic kül bassï, grilled cutlet, from Turkic kül bastï : kül, coals, ashes + bastï, pressed (meat) (from basmaq, to press).

Scampi - Inflected forms: pl. scampi. Large shrimp broiled or sautéed and served in a garlic and butter sauce.
ETYMOLOGY: Italian, pl. of scampo, a kind of lobster, from Greek kamp, bending (from its shape), perhaps from Greek kamptein, to bend.

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P.S.- Just to make it clear - I was wrong. The stuff is actually called "salsa con queso." This seems crazy as salsa merely means "sauce." Sauce with Cheese?! The sauce is cheese as without the cheese there is nothing but a few bits of whatever.