Lunenburg pudding, bowels, sausages: word origins from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day at billcasselman.com

This Lunenburg pudding is actually a pork sausage, and every part of the pig goes in except the squeal. Are the residents of one of Nova Scotia's most picturesque harbour towns daffy when they call a sausage a pudding? No, indeed. Scoffers, note that the original meaning of pudding in English was ‘sausage,’ which sense survives in terms like blood pudding, black pudding, white pudding. British English still uses a French borrowing, boudin, to name a black pudding. Remember what Robert Burns called that obscene Scottish nightmare-parody of sausage known as haggis: “great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race.” Och!

Pudding is an English mangling of the Old French boudin, from Latin botellus ‘pudding.’ Or it may be that French boudin is of Gaulish provenance and is a diminutive form of the Celtic root bot ‘penis,’ which as bod is still the word for penis in Irish Gaelic or Erse. Thus boudin would first be a joking reference to a sausage as a ‘little penis.’ That Celtic root bot may have been borrowed into early Latin also, to give botellus ‘little penis, sausage.’

The eventual association of sweet pudding and sausage occurred because early dessert puddings were stuffed in a bag and boiled or steamed, the stuffing in the bag reminding cooks of stuffing sausage meat in casings, often made of sheep or pig intestines. Elizabethan cooks began to adapt some of the sweet pudding recipes so that they did not have to be boiled or cooked in a cloth or bag. In 20th century British English, pudding evolved to mean any dessert: “What’s for pudding, luv? Month-old treacle again?”

Caution: Bowels Ahead! Now here is a small detour to discuss another French derivative from the Latin botellus, which gives us the English word bowel. The etymology looks like this: botellus Latin, little sausage > boel Old French > bouel Middle English > bowel Modern English. Yes, your bowels are your sausages.

Bowels, the plain English word for intestines, go all the way back to a Roman battlefield. Roman physicians who were trying to find out how the human body worked and how it was made, were hampered by religious taboos and superstitions. So unlike today! Remember the ignorant religionists who would curtail stem cell research. For example, early studiers of the human body were not allowed to dissect a corpse. Cutting up a dead body was not legal in ancient Rome and Greece. It was thought to be a horrible sin. So those ancient seekers of knowledge studying anatomy had to rely on looking at the dead bodies of humans who had suffered fatal, body-ripping injuries.

One of the places these early anatomists could see cut-open bodies was on the battlefield after a bloody fight in a war. Exposed coils of intestines stuck out from the corpses of slain soldiers. Perhaps these soldiers had fallen when their bellies or abdomens had been slashed open with a sword. Their intestines or bowels, exposed in a wide-open wound, looked like little sausages. So one Roman word for bowels was botelli ‘little sausages.’ More common use of such a word in Latin may have come from soldiers’ rough slang: “Got a bellyache, Brutus? Guess your sausages are upset today.”

The word history of sausage looks like this:

Middle English sausage > Old North French saussiche > Late Latin salsicia > Latin salsus salted, (meat). Salsus is one past participial form of sallere to salt > sal Latin salt

Also from Latin salsus is our Modern English word sauce.

Middle English sauce > middle French sauce, sausse > Latin salsa, feminine of salsus salted.

Botulism

From the same root word as bowel derives the disease name botulism, from another diminutive relative of botellus, this time spelled botulus ‘sausage.’

Botulism is a severe food poisoning, first observed in early 19 th-century Germany in carelessly prepared sausages, which lay around uncooked for too long after they were made and so germs grew in the raw meat. The toxins in the poisoned food can be fatal if ingested in great quantity. The cause is excessive growth of a poison-making bacterium called Clostridium botulinum, from the same bacterial family as C. difficile, a toxin presently raging through Canadian hospitals, whose full name is Clostridium difficile.

How ancient is the practice of making sausages? There is one clue in Indo-European etymology. A study of the roots of the word farce shows that it derives from a Latin verb with bound root morphemes like farc-, farct-, and fars-, roots that mean ‘to stuff.’ That in turn appears to derive from a compound Indo-European root * bhareku , made from two simpler roots:

* bheu swell + * reg stretch, bind = * bhareku

This double meaning of ‘swelling and binding or stretching out’ suggests that even in Proto-Indo-European, the verb concerned stuffing fowl and other meats, and making sausages.

From Babylon around 3,000 BCE there is a Sumerian word for sausage. Sumerian, the oldest known written language in human history, was spoken in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and peripheral regions) throughout the third millennium BC and survived as an esoteric written language until the death of the cuneiform tradition around the time of Christ.

The Chinese sausage lachang which consisted of goat and lamb meat, was first mentioned in 589 BCE. In book twenty of the Odyssey, Homer tells us that blood sausage was a fave of Odysseus and his cohorts. Parts of the Odyssey may date to 850 BCE.

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