The Bag of plentg Bearon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 1042 ORIGINS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 61, 5 June 1942, Page 4

The Bag of plentg Bearon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 1042 ORIGINS

CAPTAIN Cook, upon landing in Australia, asked a native what a strange hopping creature was called. The native responded: "Kan-ga-roo," signifying in. his language, "I don't know." Cook thought that was the animal's name, and kangaroos they have been called since. When the Sapniards went to the land, north of Niagara in search for gold and silver,, they cried out in disgust: "Acanada," meaning "There is nothing here!' . The Indians learned this word, and later when the French came they tried to explain that no gold, was to be had. "Acanada," they repeated, till the French took it for the region's name, and called it Canada.

It was just a hundred years ago that a Mr Richard Turner, wishing' to be emphatic, declared that mild attempts at temperance reform were no use,, and "nothing but tee-tee-totalism would do." Mr Turner was no stammerer: emphasis was all his aim, and he succeeded far better than he knew. Shortly after, an august London newspaper adopted the word by announcing that Her Majesty the Queen had recently given an audience to a deputation of teetotallers. Sardines. Ancient and thoroughly worn is the wheeze: "When is a fish not a fish?" —the answer being (if you don't.knQyv it already): ''When it's a sardine." Millions of people eat sardines yearly, thousands prepare and pack themj but no one ever went fishing for a sardine. The reason is that sardine is not the name of any particular fish but the result of a style of packing several varieties of small fish.

The original sarcline was a pilchard, first prepared on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia about 1400. The Sardinians soaked the pilchards in a briny solution, dried them in the warm Italian sun and then fried them in olive oil. About 1800 the name sardine entered the gourmet's vocabulary. The first commercial canning of sardines, using the Sardinian recipe and the Appert process, was at Nantes, France, in 1834.

When, in the time of Charles 11, our modern word "mob" first made its bow into the language it was a piece of pure slang. The word is the contracted form of mobile vulgus, the Latin term used to indicate the mobile;, fickle crowd swayed about by any wind of caprice.

Whole volumes of philosophy are sometimes hidden in the origin of one word. For example, our word vanity is derived from the Latin vanus, empty.

The expression "1 don't cars a fig" is derived from the old Italian word iico, which means snap of the fingers.