The boiled rice dish known as congee does congeal when cooled to make a kind of porridge, but those two words aren’t related. Congeal is related to French congelé, the past participle of French congeler, “to freeze.” Congeal and congeler share a Latin root with gel, gelatin, jelly, and gelato. Congee comes from Tamil (pronounced something like /kañci/), and variations of the name appear in most languages of India. The more modern spelling is kanji, and it’s also called jook or juk. The name jook comes from a Cantonese word 粥 that also inspired the Thai and Hawaiian names for this dish. In Japan congee is known as okayu (おかゆ), and in Sri Lanka, it’s called kenda. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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