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Wednesday, 16th January 2008

When words come to life and evoke sounds, smells and images

Charles Lamb, writing to Joseph Hume at Christmas 1807 on the subject of ‘a certain turkey and a contingent plumb-pudding’, added, ‘I always spell plumb-pudding with a b, I think it reads fatter and more suetty’. As it happens, the big OED has found the same suetty spelling in a cookery book published in 1726. As Lamb says, one of the delights of the English language is the existence of words which have almost physical properties, a propensity to conjure up succulence or flavour, warmth or cosiness, sounds and magic, powerful images and sheer solid matter. The word spelt with a ‘b’ has nothing to do with ‘plum’, which is correctly defined as ‘The fruit of the tree Prunus domestica, a roundish fleshy drupe of varying size and colour, covered with a glaucous mealy bloom, and having a somewhat flat pointed stone and sweet pulp.’ Useful word that ‘drupe’, isn’t it? By contrast, plumb means ‘to sink or fall like a plummet, to fall straight down’.

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