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Feb 5, 2024
This week’s theme
Words derived from food

This week’s words
tzimmes
gravy train
cold turkey
nothingburger
plain-vanilla

tzimmes
Photo: Sara Welch

Previous week’s theme
There’s a word for it
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

We use the word food for humans, fodder for animals, but ultimately, both go to the same root.

This week we went foraging in pastures where words abound. We filled our pantry with words derived from food. Be our companion as we share these food words often used metaphorically.

Eat up and get your linguistic sustenance for the week.

All the highlighted words above are derived from the Indo-European root: pa- (to feed or to protect).

tzimmes or tsimmes

PRONUNCIATION:
(TSIM-is/uhs)

MEANING:
noun:
1. Fuss; confusion.
2. A stew of fruits and vegetables, and sometimes meat.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Yiddish tsimes (stew). Earliest documented use: 1892.

NOTES:
A tzimmes is a stew made of carrots, sweet potatoes, prunes, raisins, etc. It’s a typical part of a Rosh Hashanah meal. It can also be a dessert. As making a tzimmes takes time and many ingredients, the term is used in its fussy meaning as well.

USAGE:
“But to admit his error, he realized, would be to jeopardize his own infallible reputation, as well as that of his future wife, who had set this whole tsimmes boiling in the first place.”
Naomi Ragen; The Saturday Wife; St. Martin’s Press; 2008.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A hungry man is not a free man. -Adlai Stevenson II, lawyer, politician, and diplomat (5 Feb 1900-1965)

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