Why “Toast”?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Micah Davidson.

I’m calling from San Diego, California.

I’m 13.

I wanted to know why people call toast, toast, instead of like toasted bread, like the process that they use to make toast. Why do they have to call it that?

That’s a good question, Micah. That’s a wonderful question. What do you think? What’s your guess?

People find it easier to call food how they make it so that people know what it is more easily.

Yeah, that’s part of it. When we speak, we look for shortcuts. And so lots of times when we have a long phrase, we will shorten it down to something much briefer, just so the sentences come out faster, the words are issued much more quickly.

Here’s a little example of how this works with this particular combination. Let’s say that toasted bread was the original form. But now let’s think about jelly beans for a second. If you and I are sorting our jelly beans and you want all the green jelly beans, eventually we’ll start to call them the greens. I’m like, okay, here are some more greens for you. And I’m going to push all the reds and yellows over here. And what we’ve started to do is take that adjective green, just drop the jelly bean, and we all agree that the adjective now behaves like a noun. Here are all the greens for you. And we do a ton of other stuff. Pickles are a really great example. It’s just a coincidence these are all food, by the way. Pickles, we’ve done the same thing. Pickled cucumbers just briefly called pickles.

So how do you feel about the answer there?

I feel like I got what I thought I would probably be. I mean, it’s just one of those questions in my head. I’m like, why do people do this? I mean, like, why? Why? I always like that’s why.

Yeah, it’s a great, that is the best question for life, isn’t it? You are one of us. Thank you. Thanks, Bud, for your call. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Micah. Take care. Bye-bye.

Okay. It’s really common, actually, in English for adjectives become nouns. One of the longest standing examples that I can think of is when we talk about the meek shall inherit the earth. The word meek is an adjective that because we’ve added the article the in front of it now behaves like a noun. And this happens all the time in English. It’s so incredibly common. The land of the free and the home of the brave.

That’s right. And it doesn’t really get people’s goat like, say, nouning verbs or verbing nouns does. That’s a really good point. You’re absolutely right. But when we turn adjectives into nouns, it just feels natural. It is a normal, completely ordinary part of the morphological structure of morphological behavior of English.

Yeah. Well, I loved Micah’s question, which made me think of tuna fish. Why do we say tuna? You know, I mean, tuna bird. It’s not. I mean, why do we say it? It’s a fish. We know it’s fish. I don’t know. Language just makes no sense whatsoever.

My favorite, though, of all the adjectives turned into nouns, though, is the category of demonyms. And these are the words that we call people from another country. English. It’s an English farmer. The English. And there’s a food one for that one, too. A Danish. Right? It used to be a Danish pastry. We dropped the pastry. Now it’s just a Danish. Which doesn’t really come from Denmark. It’s Vienna. It comes from Vienna. Somebody should get this language into shape.

Somebody should. Help us out. Call us. 877-929-9673.