So why shouldn’t I wet my appetite?

Trevor @ Friday November 25th 2005 22:25

I know it’s banned in English, but it seems perfectly natural to me, just as natural as wetting one’s whistle: if it don’t rain it won’t grow, and the road to the kebab shop is awash with Blairite pub extensions.

Gordonio, a medical treatise published in 1495, is against drinking between meals but recommends they be preceded by a bath taken with camomile and marigold and followed by a dose of atriaca, an “ancient pharmaceutical concoction composed of many ingredients but principally of opium. Used against the bites of wild animals.” In Modern that’s having a spliff. Current opinion seems, however, to be divided as to the effects of smoking one’s appetite.

(The etymology of (a)triaca is very interesting: Hispanic Arabic attiryaq -> Classical Arabic tiryaq -> Latin theriaca -> Greek theriake (antidotos), (antidote against a poisonous bite from) a wild animal, feminine of theriakos, of wild animals, -> therion, diminutive of ther, wild animal.

Treacle comes from the same root, which surely means that Tate & Lyle used to market Golden Syrup for colonial pest control, and that it was used to poison the lion on the tin.)


Categories: Languages, Les bourgeois, Provisions and utensils of the household and the fields

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