What! The weekend is here already!? Ah, I delight in Friday. This looks like a busy weekend for us, but we get to see some old friends. (Yes, because we are contemporaries, they are old friends.) Time for some words.
GALLIMAUFRY [gah-lee-MO-free]
I can hear the protests now: "That's not right! It's the name of your blog." So it is, so it is. And you believe you know what it means because it must be a miscellany, right? Well, do you know the source of the word? In fact it means "a stew" and the word comes from French. Ironically, the "galli" part of it does not seem to come from the Latin name for France (Gaul; cf. gallicanism). In fact no one seems to know where the old French word "galimaufre" came from. I will do more research, perhaps while consuming stew.
FURTHER RESEARCH
The old French word galimafrée first appeared in literature at the end of the fourteenth century. Though the origin is obscure, it likely comes from a couple of Picard words: galer meaning "to have fun" and mafrer meaning "to eat a lot." Imagine a scene in which a cook brings out a steaming cauldron of bubbling stew and proclaims "Galez! Mafrez!" Pronounced gah-LAY, ma-FRAY, it would translate roughly as "Have fun! Gorge yourselves!" So apprently in Picardy during the Middle Ages, people amused themselves by eating lots of stew or gallimaufry.
GALACTOPHAGE [guh-LAC-to-fage]
This is the perfect word for addressing annoying children. Oh, sure, you could say "rug-rat" or "ankle-biter," but they have heard those terms before. This one simply means "milk drinker" but it has such a ring to it. For more confusion, address them as "ante-jentacular galactophages"; that means they drink milk before breakfast. Have a great weekend!
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3 comments:
How do we know you aren't just making this stuff up?
I'm totally into the whole stew o' fun thing. That's cool.
You could try using the galactophage thing on your kids, but then they'd go repeating it at school and the teacher would be calling your house and there would be detention involved and you'd try to explain - "No - really! It just means milk-drinker! Honest!". But no one would buy it and you'd be drummed out of the PTA.
Which might not be a bad idea, at that...
I suppose if you do not have an unabridged dictionary at your disposal, Jonboy, you don't know if I am making it up. I must confess that I occasionally consult a book called The Superior Person's Book of Words, the author of which has planted a few spurious terms just so the reader will not feel too superior. But I check out everything with a thoroughness commensurate with the gravity of this blog. For instance, the research on "gallimaufry" came largely from the Larousse Nouveau dictionnaire étymologique et historique.
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