08.18.08

Etymology in a bag

Posted in unfortunate English, word history, wordplay at 6:54 am by Bill Brohaugh

File under “A spoonful of sugar helps the etymology go down . . .”

Who would have thought that candy could be so educational? Our audiovisual aid today:

Tart in its various forms has various origins:

• The sweet: as in the dessert tart, coming to English in the 1200s from French.
• The tart: as in the adjective tart, meaning “sharp, piquant,” originating from an Old English word teart, with intense meanings of pain and suffering
• The sweet and tart: as in the pejorative tart applied to prostitutes, promiscuous women and occasionally men. This version of the word was sweet in that it was used in a positive sense when it appeared around the mid 1800s; it took pejorative connotations not long after.

So where does the candy come in? SweeTarts is a cleverly effective name in that it describes the confection’s sweet/sour flavors while recalling the positive word sweetheart. Significant to the word lovers among us is the fact that it almost certainly displays in its SweeTart/sweetheart pun the true origin of the once-nice now-pejorative noun tart. No, not the spicy nature of a type of woman. The heart of your sweetheart.

We’re not precisely sure how the word originated, but the two most likely explanations involve either a shortening of sweetheart or a shortening of jam-tart, a Cockney rhyming slang version of sweetheart.

Now class, your assignment includes reading four bags of M&Ms to prep for both spelling and math class next week.

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