Caroline in Charlotte, North Carolina, recalls her grandparents often used vittles to mean “food.” The word vittles derives from Latin victualis, meaning “nourishment” or “sustenance,” an etymological relative of such words as vitality and vitamin. Latin victualis passed into Old French, and along the way lost that hard C sound, becoming vitaille. After a form of this was borrowed into English, 16th-century scholars reinserted the C to make it look more like the original Latin. But the C-less pronunciation stuck around. Today the word can be spelled victuals or vittles, but both are pronounced to rhyme with littles. For a splendid introduction to the cuisine, folkways, foodways, language, and history of Appalachia, check out food writer Ronni Lundy’s book Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
When you’re talking about the location of an inanimate object, is it okay to say that it lives there, as in The peanut butter lives in that cabinet or The flashlight lives on that shelf? Strictly speaking, of course, that object isn’t...
Sean in Oneonta, New York, says that when he was growing up in New Jersey, his family would pile in the car and set off on a surprise adventure, whether a short distance or long, and the kids would be told only that they were going on Buxtehude...
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