a nice verb: "truffle"

[Laurence Horn]

…and while "truffle" is indeed a verb--or at least "truffled" is a past participle (although arguably an adjectival rather than verbal one)--it's only attested for those other (less sweet, but more expensive) kind of truffles, the ones pigs go for.  (Well, maybe they go for both kinds, but they don't need the same kind of training for the non-fungal sort.)  The OED does have that from 1830 ("The liver and thighs of geese,..made into pies, and properly truffled,..are reckoned a most delicate article."), presumably based on Fr. truffé (often modifying pâté).  Curious that the first non-fungal "truffle" (n.), i.e. 'A type of confectionery made of a mixture of chocolate and cream, freq. flavoured with rum, shaped into a ball and covered with powdered chocolate', is first cited in the Army & Navy Stores Catalogue for 1926-7.  Who knew?

LH

On Dec 7, 2013, at 12:55 PM, George Thompson wrote:

> From a review in the December 19, 2013 issue of the New York Review of
> Books, viewed online.
> Marina Warner, writing about several books on monsters as represented on
> medieval maps.
> "Olaus Magnus was the Catholic archbishop of Uppsala, who was ousted from
> his cathedral by the Swedish Reformers and took refuge in Danzig, and he
> may have been inspired by nostalgic pride in his lost homeland. He truffled
> the northern oceans with dozens of colossal and polymorphous mythic
> monsters, as if laying out a deluxe box of chocolates with glorious flavors
> and varieties, emerald green and crimson, frilled and bulbous, toothy,
> barbed, and serpentine."
>
> Not in OED -- I suppose the revision is still in the Rs? -- and probably it
> doesn't need to be.  But I like it.
>
> GAT
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org