‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce the bivalve to rhyme with dollop, there was a certain lack of contrast.
There has been a scallop war with France in past days. Though both French and English enjoy them on the plate, it is the French in the 15th century who provided us with the name, escalope. We just knocked the beginning off the word. Our cockle too, from at least a century earlier, is from the French word that gives them coquilles St Jacques. (Mussel is from Latin musculus, ‘muscle’, which also gave the word mus, ‘mouse’, from the obvious resemblance.) The scallop shell was an ideal emblem, easy to find at Santiago de Compostela, for pilgrims to pin on their coats.
Pliny had a nagging doubt about the scallop: does it have eyes? ‘Yet hath not Nature given eies to all creatures,’ he declares, in the translation by Philemon Holland of 1601.
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