Mind your language | 1 January 2011

The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes.

The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, spoke of an ‘obesogenic environment’.

I thought he’d made up the word obesogenic. It’s a bastard formation, half-Latin and half-Greek. But my husband tells me it has been around in bariatric circles for decades. ‘Bariatric?’ I said. Yes, he said, bariatrics is a medical specialty spawned in America in the 1960s, in response to a condition brought on by prosperity, but now prevalent among the poor: fatness.

Perhaps Mr Lansley should have spoken of a barogenic environment. At least baro- comes from Greek, though baros is used in the New Testament to mean ‘burden’, as in ‘the heat and burden of the day’. Scientists took it up in the sense of ‘pressure’, hence barometer.

Those who, like my husband, are not thin, rather resent being saddled with the label obese. Yet all synonyms have their own degrees of pejorative connotations: stout, plump, heavy, corpulent.

Was Hamlet fat? During his duelling scene he is called ‘fat and scant of breath’, though some say that means ‘in a sweat’. But Shakespeare could indeed mean ‘fat’ by fat, as is shown by a phrase in Love’s Labours Lost: ‘grosse, grosse, fat, fat’. Yet Tyndale in his translation of the Bible makes the Moabites ‘all fat, and men of might’, where the Authorised Version has ‘all lusty, and all men of valour’, so there was clearly good fat and bad fat.

Stout, by comparison, had a long run as an almost entirely positive word, meaning ‘proud, brave, resolute, splendid, strong’. Only in the 19th century was it recruited as a euphemism for ‘fat’, as in the cartoon by John Leech, in Punch from 1855, of a fat woman in a round hat captioned: ‘Stout Party: Well, I’m sure! What can possess those skinny creatures to wear round hats, I can’t think, — making themselves so conspicuous!’

Gross, originally the late Latin grossus, synonymous with crassus,  has enjoyed an almost wholly negative history, sharing with thick a meaning of ‘stupid’.