Cheek “Buccal” vs. Belt “Buckle” vs. Dessert “Buckle”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ben Smitkoff calling from Boston, Massachusetts.

Hi, Ben. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

So I have a two-year-old who one of her favorite things to do is to play with buckles, B-U-C-K-L-E, which is important in just a minute.

And I have a bio background, and I knew that there was a word for cheek, buckle, B-U-C-C-A-L.

And on a lark, I wanted to see if they were related, and they were.

And now I get to my question, which is I told this to my father, who is a retired physician.

He said, oh, that’s interesting, but what about the dessert?

And there’s a New England dessert called the buckle, B-U-C-K-L-E, and I didn’t know, so I figured I’d give you guys a call.

What a delicious question.

Yeah, all these words are connected.

You’re right.

You have a scientific background, did you say?

I do.

I have an undergraduate degree in biology.

Oh, okay.

All right.

So then you know that buckle, B-U-C-C-A-L, has to do with the cheek.

And that goes back to the Latin word for cheek, bucca.

And the Latin word buccala means the cheek strap of a metal helmet.

And on those old metal helmets that Romans used to wear, they’d have little knobs sticking out.

And later, buccala, those little knobs on the cheek strap of a helmet, came to mean the little pointy knob on a shield.

And then the old French word for this part that sticks out, the boucle, it’s related to those words, started to apply to a spiked metal ring for holding a belt.

So, you know, you’ve got a little spike sticking out and you put the ring over it and that secures the belt.

And all of those words are related, if you think about buckles and bending.

They’re related to the Middle English word, bokelen, which means to bend or warp or arch the body.

And we get the word buckle, meaning to bend under the weight of something or to collapse.

And that seems to be the connection with that kind of dessert that you’re talking about.

And it’s one of many foods that are named for what they do because there’s, I mean, the buckle that you’re talking about, it’s kind of like a cobbler.

Is that right?

Yeah, I’ve always known it as almost like a cake batter with a lot of fruit in it.

Yeah, there’s a similar dessert that’s called a slump.

It’s kind of the same idea.

So that cobbler buckles and the similar dessert slumps.

There’s also another version of this.

It’s very similar called grunt.

Have you heard of that one?

I’ve not heard of that one, no.

Yeah, that’s also a New England dish, and it’s called grunts because of the bubbling sound that the fruit makes when it’s stewed.

All of those desserts are somewhat similar, but there are a lot of words in English, actually, and in other languages, too, that have to do with what the food is said to do, you know, like bubble and squeak in Britain, or shabu-shabu, that Japanese broth that sounds like shabu-shabu when it’s boiling.

So the dessert called buckle, as far as we know, has to do with the way that it just kind of collapses.

So all of those words are connected in kind of weird ways.

Yeah. Thank you so much. I’ll have to tell my father.

A couple other things here. So a buckle, the dessert, is kind of like a crumble or a cobbler or a streusel?

Yeah, very similar to that. I’m getting hungry just talking about this.

And you mentioned the grunt.

Now, as I understand it, those are also common in the Maritimes in Canada.

And also that is where blueberry buckles in particular are common in the Maritimes.

Blueberry buckles are probably the most common kind of buckle as far as I know.

The other thing is I want to go all the way back to that Latin.

That is, if I remember correctly, the source of the Spanish word boca for mouth.

It could well be.

Yeah, I never thought about that.

But yeah, probably.

Thank you, Ben, for your conversation.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Okay.

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