Sunday afternoon tidying up, came across a copy of Times 2 for December 2010 which had escaped recycling.
An interesting article by Heston Blumenthal on how ‘our linguistic heritage is testament to how central food is to existence’, how our language is peppered with things which derive from cuisine, & how food terminology has crept into our language as an indicator of class in words such as upper crust.
Of which he found plenty of examples to quote without even needing to mention one linguistic fact that we all learned in primary school history – that we use French words for meat but Anglo Saxon words for animals because the poor serfs & villeins never got to eat the meat from the animals they tended for the cruel Norman overlords.
I was more sceptical of his claim for the origin of the much-mocked Hyacinth Bucket habit of raising your little finger on the hand which holds the china cup from which you drink your tea – supposedly a hangover from the Tudor custom of using your little finger in place of the yet-to-be-invented table fork. Obviously this then had to be kept well clear to avoid spreading gravy all over your hand & clothes.
My own inverted-snob attitude to this habit was transformed instantly one evening about twenty years ago during a visit to the Loughborough bell foundry.
Apart from a sort of overhead crane which had been installed to hoist the bells, the technology & working conditions seemed virtually unchanged from Victorian times. The metal for the bells was melted in a huge vat which then had to be diligently stirred, by hand, using an implement which reminded me of a posser. We were told that a new apprentice would be put to this task without being told of the importance of raising you’re your little finger on the dominant hand; the result, one very tired & aching arm, in fact it was impossible to keep going for the required amount of time.
Try it for yourself – raise & lower your arm rapidly with all your fingers curled round an imaginary pole handle, then just experience the relief of doing it with your little finger stuck out.
I thought of all my female forebears toiling with the washing in the dolly tub – of course they learned to stick their little finger out.
And, when drinking tea on Sunday from the precious best china tea set – of course they raised their little finger – the handles were often pretty small anyway, maybe room for only one finger, making it all too easy to let slip, especially if your arm got overtired while lifting it.
