Semantic bleaching, in your own kitchen
Part of being a good English speller is pausing every once in a while, taking a little breath, and remembering that, for instance, the mantel of a fireplace has an 鈥渆l鈥� at the end, whereas the mantle that is a cloak is spelled instead like Mickey Mantle, the baseball player.
But what about, say, flower and flour? Mantel and mantle come up infrequently enough that they may never quite get to be second nature. Surely, though, everyone knows that you put a flower in a vase on the table (or mantel), and you keep flour in a container in the kitchen cabinet. The two are completely different words, aren鈥檛 they?
Hmm, not so fast. Flower, despite its decidedly Germanic-looking 鈥渨,鈥� came into English around 1200, from the Old French flor, according to the . Flower referred to the blossom of a flowering plant, or the plant itself (鈥減lanting flowers in the garden鈥�), and like many words of that time, had a number of variant spellings, including flour. The Old French flor included this garden-variety sense of 鈥渇lower,鈥� but also ideas of 鈥減rime,鈥� 鈥渉eyday,鈥� 鈥渆lite,鈥� 鈥渋nnocence,鈥� and even 鈥渇ine flour.鈥�
traces the English flour to the middle of the 13th century, when it referred specifically to the 鈥渇iner portion of ground grain.鈥�
The coarser parts of the ground grain were called meal. That word seems to have been part of English forever. As is common in English, the term for the humbler thing is a native English word; the high-end product is a French import.
(Meal in the sense of the food one eats at one sitting turns out to be a completely different word, by the way, in a sense of 鈥渢ime for eating.鈥�)
The idea behind flour, the dictionary explains, was of 鈥渢he 鈥榝inest part鈥� of meal, perhaps as the flower is the finest part of the plant or the fairest plant of the field.鈥� On the same principle, 鈥渇lour of milk鈥� seems to have been an early 14th-century term for cream.聽
The modern French term fleur de sel, for delicate crystals harvested from the surface of evaporation pools, is another expression of this idea. It means literally 鈥渇lower of salt,鈥� and it鈥檚 coming soon to a pricey boutique near you.
Around 1830, as people began to see the usefulness of fixed spellings, flour came to refer to ground grain and flower to a blossom.
You might say that what happened to flour was that it lost its 鈥減innacle鈥� quality and became a kitchen commodity.
In his recent book, 鈥�,鈥� Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky calls this process 鈥渟emantic bleaching鈥�: Part of the original meaning of a word gets 鈥渂leached out.鈥�
The of one of the brands of flour inhabiting the storage containers on my kitchen shelves proudly advertise their product as 鈥渘ever bleached, never bromated.鈥�
Ah, if only they knew.聽
