The Linguaphile Series: Eating Humble Pie & Other Indigestibles

Even though English isn’t my first language, I’ve always been fascinated by its words and their origins. That’s why the vocabulary portions on the SAT are so enjoyable for me. But as something of an English enthusiast my self, my own theory is that if you know the etymology of a word, then you’re twice is unlikely to forget the meaning of it than when you don’t, or when you’re simply memorizing the exact meaning (or meanings) off a list or flashcard.

So normally, whenever I encounter a new word or phrase, I try and go look it up at The Free Dictionary, Doctor Dictionary or Dictionary & Reference and find out its root word in Latin (or whichever language it originates from). That way you can recognize other words with the same or similar roots. But this routine is harder to follow when you have a target of 50 or more word to learn every week, as you have when you’re preparing for the SAT.

I’ve slacked up a little on this routine of mine, so in order to make up, I’ll use this platform of my blog. I’m subscribed to two separate daily word-a-day mailing lists, one of them being the delightful Anu Garg ‘Wordsmith Word-A-Day’ newsletter and the other by Doctor Dictionary. Every now and then, I’ll share words and phrases that interest and fascinate me from these lists and elsewhere. And for what its worth, I’ll call this ‘The Linguaphile Series‘. If you have suggestions for words or phrases that you’d like me to discuss, leave behind a comment, or fire off an email.

In the first edition, I’d like to discuss the phrase ‘eating humble pie‘ which I had incorrectly used in a previous post here. When reader Khalq pointed that out, I was, so to speak, forced to eat humble pie The phrase, as rightly pointed out by Khalq, is used when one makes a serious error and needs to acknowledge it humbly. Michael Quinion tells us at the World Wide Words website that “it is highly probable that the expression you use to describe the process has something to do with food”. In the United States, the phrase is “to eat crow”, and other variations include “to eat dirt” and “to eat one’s words”. “Humble pie” as such, is more of a British version. Here’s how it came into usage:

eating humble pie, [... ]contains two ideas rolled in together, a portmanteau dish. The original umbles were the innards of the deer: the liver, heart, entrails and other second-class bits. It was common practice in medieval times to serve a pie made of these parts of the animal to the servants and others who would be sitting at the lower tables in the lord’s hall. Pepys mentions it in his diary for 8 July 1663: “Mrs Turner came in and did bring us an Umble-pie hot out of her oven, extraordinarily good”.

However, it seems it was not until the nineteenth century that the expression humble pie appeared in the sense we now know, and some have reasoned that it did so as a deliberate play on words. If so, it was a very small play. The word umbles is a variant form of an old French term noumbles, (originally from Latin lumulus, a diminutive of lumbus, from which we also get loin and lumbar); [...] umbles also sometimes appeared in medieval times and later in the form humbles.

Contrariwise, the word humble (originally from the Latin humilem from which we also get humility) was frequently spelt and pronounced “umble” from medieval times right down to the nineteenth century. So the figurative sense of umble pie could have appeared at almost any time since the medieval period; indeed, so close is the association that it is surprising that the OED’s first citation dates only from 1830.

Fascinating. So it the original phrase might have been an numble or umble pie! According to Phrases.org “the similarity of the sound of the words, and the fact that umble pie was often eaten by those of humble situation could easily have been the reason for ‘eat humble pie’ to have come to have its current idiomatic meaning”. Furthermore, it is “possible that it was the pies that caused the move from numbles to umbles“. This would then be in the same way that ‘a norange‘ become ‘an orange‘, ‘a napron‘ became ‘an apron‘ and ‘an ewt‘ became ‘a newt‘. This changing of the boundaries between words, according to Phrases.org is called “metanalysis” and is pretty commonplace in the English language.

Hmm…so it could well be possible, that a century down the line, our future generations may have further metanlysised the humble pie and changed it into a humble pizza. May be we will even have local versions for this phrase in the future too. How does humble pakorra sound to everyone? Lets test it out in a secntence:

After causing much outrage over his presentation ceremony gaffe, the Pakistan skipper was forced to eat humble pakora.

Yummy!

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