Chili peppers hot,
Chile peppers cold,
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old.

This, of course, is a recast of the old “pease porridge” nursery rhyme, infused with a different set of concepts to make a point about the verbal porridge representing the relationship between chili peppers, the country of Chile, and the chilly reception you’ll get from etymologists if you suggest that any of these words are connected.

Chili peppers hot: Chili (the pepper and ultimately the stew made with the pepper) traces back through Spanish to the native South American Nahuatl word for the pepper plant. It is not, as Dutch physician and botanist Jacobus Bontius wrote in 1631, a “quasi dicas Piper e Chile” (“named as if a pepper from Chile,” if my Latin translation is anywhere in the same hemisphere as the actual meaning, but then again, remember that I tried to translate “E Pluribus Unum” by myself as a kid, and could only come up with “made of lead”).

Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:

Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old: Our adjective chilly and its source noun chill, meaning “cold,” traces all the way back to Old English. And just to confuse matters, one early spelling of chill was chile.

Why do I spend so much time disassociating chili and Chile and chilly? Well, I hail from the Cincinnati area, where a favorite local dish is a bed of spaghetti, topped with a spiced meat sauce (cinnamon and chocolate or cocoa among the spices), chopped onions, beans and grated cheese [recipe from Cincinnati chef Paul Sturkey here]. This dish is “Cincinnati chili,” and it, too, has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned chilis.

Yes, you Texans and Mexicans and Chileans, we know this concoction is not “real” chili, and, by gosh, we don’t care.

The ’60s were so long ago. By that I mean the 1360s, the time of Chaucer (and no, the topic has not veered from Blondie). Wordie, meet Blondie . . . in the form of the Japes for Owre Tymes blog. That’s not modern misspelling; that’s Middle English. Japes for Owre Tymes is a delightfully arcane blog that each day translates a modern cartoon into Middle English. I wonder what the Middle English translation of “thought balloon” is?

Check out (yes) Blondie in Middle English here.

Including Blondie in this Middle-English-a-Day endeavor is appropriate, because the strip has been around since 1930—and in comic strip terms, 1930 is the equivalent of Middle English.

Now, let’s take cartoons back to the origins of English: Old English. And we don’t even have to translate. Here’s an installment of The Captain and the Kids (more commonly known as The Katzenjammer Kids):

Well, maybe not precisely. Anyway, back to Japes for Owre Tymes. Check out the most recent installment for an interesting lesson on the disconnect between language and reality in the form of The Family Circus (and check out Comics Curmudgeon for additional insight on the very same topic).

(By the way, in the early 1360s, Chaucer would have been in his late teens. I wonder if he rolled his sleeves up for his packs of death sticks?)

Technically, divination by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals (rarely greyhounds in the real world, I might add) is known as extispicy, a word I’d not encountered until recently. The discovery allowed me to delightedly add a definition to my English Delusionary: Extispic Etymology, or “predicting a word’s history by examining its clumsy vivisection.”

On the other hand, allow me to reveal a word history based on more-precise physical vivisection, in this an entry from my book Unfortunate English:

It’s a scene worthy of Hannibal Lechter or Jeffrey Daehmer or your favorite cannibal of choice. A human being is slashed open, revealing intestines and other entrails. It’s bloody, it’s gory, it’s . . . kind of like visiting the meat counter of the grocery store, with its tasty display of neatly packaged sausages.

At the time of this image and the verbal imagery that resulted, there weren’t any grocery stores as we know them, of course. The image may very well have occurred on a field of battle, where someone inclined to odd poetry viewed the insides of the eviscerated, and saw . . . sausages. (Perhaps the poetry wasn’t that odd, in that sausages are meats stuffed into casings—and the original casings were animal intestines.) In Latin, the word for small intestine was a diminutive of the word for sausage.

We use that diminutive word today, by the way, in a couple of forms. The Latin word was botulus, which was taken into Old French as boel, and into Middle English as bouel, what you and I now spell bowel. (The other form is botulism, the medical term adapted from German, describing not an affliction of the bowel as one might be prone to guess, but instead a type of food poisoning often associated with ill-prepared processed foods—originally and specifically, sausages.)

The new science of Extispic Etymology at its finest!

Hold on, Mr. Masochistic Meteorologist. Clouds spilling blood? What’s that all about?

It’s about a paraphrase of Edgar Allen Poe:

Once upon a midnight gory,
While I pondered ’bout this story . . .

In Old English, dreor was flowing blood. (As an aside, dreor arises from a root meaning “flow” or “fall”—dreor was a specific type of flow—that of blood.) If something was dreary, it was bloody.

Bloody stuff is usually pretty horrid, and bloody people are in dire straits, and dreary came to take figurative but still pretty intense meanings of “horrid” or “dire.” People in bloodied states are usually not happy about it, and early on dreary also meant “frightened” or “sad.” By the mid 1600s—more likely a softening of “dire or horrid” rather than a twist on “frightened or sad,” the word was applied to situations that make you sad—gloomy, dreary conditions.

So in the figurative sense, the clouds were spilling not blood, but were spilling instead, um . . . blood. And here I’m referring to another original word meaning. The hell with the cliches. Better start crying over spilled milk. Mourn the spilling of milk. Sing dirges because of it. Weep openly.

To spill back in Old English was “to kill, slay, rob of life.” (“Stop me before I spill again!”) And for several centuries of English it had associated meanings related to suicide, destruction, devastation and spoilage. By the early 1100s, to spill was “to ooze blood,” a sense that led by the early 1300s to the meaning of spill as we know it.

That in mind, don’t those dreary days seem a little easier to take now?