Hazel Hall from Priestfield Road, Edinburgh, was making fritters the other day when the thought came to her to ask me whether there could be a connection between the word for apples dipped in batter and fried in deep fat, the fritters that mean small pieces, and the verb that means to break into small pieces.
Fritter, the food, is from Old French friture, from Latin frictus, fried, from frigere to fry. The other fritter is, according to Collins, an 18th-century word, probably from obsolete fitter, to break into little pieces, ultimately from old English fitt, a piece, 18th century? Does nobody at Collins read Shakespeare any more? Do they not remember Falstaff having a laugh at the Welshman Evans's pronunciation of cheese and butter in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Seese and putter! Have I liv'd to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?"
Hazel had a second question. She is fan of Leonardo di Caprio and urges me to buy the video of Romeo and Juliet. She once took part in a school production of the play, she tells me, but it is so long ago that she has forgotten what the following exchange means:
Nurse: Doth not rosemary and Romeo begin both with a letter? Romeo: Ay, nurse: what of that?; both with an R.
Nurse: Ah, mocker! That's the dog's name.
R, the dog's letter, from its resemblance in sound to the snarling of a dog, was a familiar idea in Shakespeare's time. Jonson, in his English Grammar, says: "R is the dog's letter and hurreth in the sound."
In Ship of Fools (1578) we find, "This man malicious which troubled is with wrath. Nought els soundeth but the hoorse letter R. Though all be well, yet he none answere hath Save the dogges letter glowming with nar, nar."
There you are, Hazel. I sincerely hope that Leonardo didn't follow the current trend of pronouncing Juliet as if she had been a French girl.
Among the interesting words sent to me by a regular correspondent from Cavan, James Maguire, is the word snog. A snog , he says, is "a low-down cur of the human variety". James has never heard the word outside Cavan and Monaghan.
This is the Irish word snag (pronounced "snog"), defined by the incomparable Dinneen as "a snail, a creeping thing or person, a crawler".