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Word of the Week: Grout

11/17/2015

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grout

\ˈgrau̇t\
Picture
Illustration based on U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Kate Thornton-Maurer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
One of the highlights of our family trip to Paris this summer was our adopted neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement. We rented an apartment a bit removed from from the museums and tourist spots, on a boulevard with the leafy, occasionally gritty vibe of a slowly gentrifying urban center. Pensioners, students, young professionals, and immigrants mingled in the streets. Metal shop shutters were marked with multi-lingual graffiti. Interspersed with the groceries and halal meat shops and boulangeries were places selling electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, surgical scrubs. I told a friend how lovely it was to be in a part of Paris where, instead of souvenirs and guidebooks, you could buy a bag of grout.
Picture
Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. Photo by Clicsouris (Photo personnelle), via Wikimedia Commons.
​I don’t know why I am fascinated by grout. I’ve always loved watching people apply it, using that thin, soupy mortar to seal the gaps between tiles. And I just like the word: it is a old, plain word for an old, plain substance. It comes from the Old English grūt, meaning meal or porridge (which is after all what it looks like), and it harks back to a proto Indo-European root *ghreu- meaning “to rub or grind.” There’s a connection to beer as well (the other great permutation of porridge): in the Middle Ages “grout” referred to the fermented infusion of malt that settles to bottom of the brewer’s vat. It’s related to the Dutch word gruit, which means “dregs,” as well as to modern English “grits” and “groats.” 

I have been thinking a lot about Parisian grout, after the neighborhood we so briefly called home came under assault last Friday. In the past few days I have been mentally retracing our steps across the district, recalling people we encountered. The red-haired bartender at the café across from the Bataclan concert hall, where Everett and I stopped for a drink after buying food for our Bastille Day dinner. The lady at the nearby boulangerie who greeted me kindly every afternoon and grinned behind her hand at my bad French. The restaurant we visited on our first night in Paris, around the corner from Le Petit Cambodge, where we sat at a sidewalk table into the long evening. The middle-aged man at the table next to ours who rose, smiling, to greet his companion with a kiss. The knots of young adults—black, brown, white—lounging on the canal embankment, chatting, smoking, drinking cheap beer. I hope they are safe and well, and that they find healing.


One article I read in the aftermath of the attacks pointed to a possible rationale behind the terrorists’ choice of targets: this was the heart of young, progressive Paris, the author said, places where white Parisians and folks from the banlieues mingle and hang out. Where the bonds between immigrant and native are being hesitantly, imperfectly strengthened.  The terrorists could not have been blind to this symbolism, he said, when they struck here—not at government ministries or cultural sites or tourist magnets, but at ordinary life and the promise of a more integrated society.

Perhaps so. They struck at the young bartender and the baker and the restaurant goers and the young people beside the canal. At places where you eat and drink, where there is porridge and beer and good bread. Places where people rub up together. Where a community is bound together by a thin, fluid mortar that flows into the gaps between them. A smile, a nod, a can of beer. Music. A kiss. Grout.


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Word of the Week: Squash

11/3/2015

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squash

\ˈskwäsh\
​We are awash in squash. The weekly box from our CSA is overflowing with pumpkins, butternut and acorn squash, cucumbers, melons, zucchini. Our counter looks like this every week:
Picture
ACTUAL picture of one of our weekly deliveries. (Photo credit: my neighbor April)
I have perforce been contemplating the word squash.

It is in fact a lovely case of convergent evolution. The verb squash (meaning to crush or squeeze flat) comes from the Old French escasser (“to crush, shatter, destroy, or break,”). This in turn comes from the Vulgar Latin *exquassare, from Latin ex- “out” plus quassare “to shatter.” It’s related to quash, and to squeeze, and (distantly) to scud.
 
But squash the noun—the word for the things covering my counter—comes from the Narraganset word askuutasquash. This word is a compound of askut, meaning “green, raw, uncooked” + asquash “thing that may be eaten” – so “a green thing that may be eaten raw.” My sources helpfully note that in the Algonquian languages –ash is a plural affix, which is appropriate because, as anyone who has ever cultivated a zucchini patch knows, there is never only one squash. 

But if the word was brought into English by contact with Native Americans does that mean that squash was unknown to Europeans before contact with the Americas? The answer is a little bit involved.
 
There have been gourds and squashes pretty much since there have been people. In fact these might be the first plants ever to have been domesticated. DNA analysis suggests that members of the Cucurbitaceae family (especially bottle gourds) were being domesticated in Asia and Africa from about 12,000–13,000 years ago. Some members of the family made their way to the Americas (possibly by being carried or possibly by floating), where various MesoAmerican peoples started cultivating them, eventually giving rise to much of the bounty on my counter: thin-skinned summer squashes like zucchini, pattypan, and crookneck, and hard-shelled winter squashes like pumpkin, acorn, and butternut.


But while Europeans, Asians and Africans did not have access to pumpkins and zucchini before 1500, other cucurbits—including melons, gourds, and cucumbers—were well known. Folks in pre-contact Europe may have languished for want of pumpkin pie (not to mention BLTs and tater tots), but they at least had cucumbers and melons. And colorful metaphors thereby: Arwulf tells me that the Latin word for cucumber (cucurbita) also meant “dolt,” not unlike our idiom “melon-head.”

(Side note: when I was a kid I would sometimes catch Richard Pryor movies on afternoon TV. These movies were heavily overdubbed for broadcast and I was puzzled for quite a long time about why Pryor seemed so fixated on “melon-pickers.” Just about EVERYONE in those movies was called a melon-picker at one point or another.)

Now, of course, all kinds of squashes are grown pretty much everywhere. Wikipedia tells me that China alone produces more than 6 million metric tons of squash every year, plus 41 million metric tons of cucumbers and 57 million metric tons of watermelon. And the good folks at our local CSA are not far behind. There are something like 975 identified species in the Cucurbitaceae family, and I believe we have sampled most of them. We’ve had casseroles and breads, pies and side dishes and agua fresca. I have the creeping sense that something is about to come sprouting out of the discarded rinds and seeds in the trash and envelop the kitchen in inescapable tendrils. 

Not for nothing are squashes and gourds nigh-on universal symbols of fertility, being not only suggestively round and firm and full of seeds, but also insanely prolific.
I comfort myself by remembering that when our culinary invention runs dry there is another nice instance of the convergence between the Latin exquassare and the Narraganset askuutasquash: science departments at many colleges and universities have a Halloween tradition of freezing pumpkins in liquid nitrogen and dropping them off the roofs of buildings. This not only squashes the squash, it does so in a way very much in keeping with the original Latin meaning: the pumpkin shatters outwards with a satisfying boom. Thus the ex-quassare creates an ex-squash.
Video of a pumpkin drop at the University of Oregon. NB: the first pumpkin that drops is not frozen and as such is a little disappointing. For the real deal, fast forward to 0:41
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